John: An Earth Bible Commentary: Supposing Him to Be the Gardener 9780567674517, 9780567674531, 9780567674524

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EARTH BIBLE COMMENTARY

Series Editor Norman C. Habel

JOHN: AN EARTH BIBLE COMMENTARY

Supposing Him to Be the Gardener

Margaret Daly-Denton

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published in 2019 © Margaret Daly-Denton, 2017 Margaret Daly-Denton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Borut Trdina/istock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7451-7 PB: 978-0-5676-8645-9 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7452-4 ePub: 978-0-5676-7939-0 Series: Earth Bible Commentary Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of Seán Freyne (1935–2013) Professor of Theology at Trinity College Dublin 1980–2002

‘Noli Me Tangere’ by Graham Sutherland Image reproduced with the permission of Chichester Cathedral. ‘Noli Me Tangere’ is on display in Chichester Cathedral. Open daily with free entry: www.chichestercathedral.org.uk

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Abbreviations

xiv xv

INTRODUCTION: AN EARTH-CONSCIOUS READING §1 Look around you, and see (Jn 4.35) §2 I have set you an example (Jn 13.15) §3 His disciples remembered that it was written (Jn 2.17) §4 You search the Scriptures (Jn 5.39) §5 To love all things that exist (Wis. 11.24) §6 Written so that you may come to believe (Jn 20.31) §7 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

1 1 2 3 5 6 8 10

Chapter 1 SUPPOSING HIM TO BE THE GARDENER 1. §1 To till and keep the garden (Gen. 2.15) 1. §2 God planted a garden in Eden (Gen. 2.8) 1. §3 The king’s paradise (Neh. 2.8) 1. §4 The garden of God on the holy mountain (Ezek. 28.13-14) 1. §5 Heaven and earth completed and all their beauty (LXX Gen. 2.1) 1. §6 The centre of the Earth (Ezek. 38.12) 1. §7 The temple of his body (Jn 2.21) Chapter 2 IN THE BEGINNING 2. §1 A breath of the power of God (Wis. 7.25) 2. §2 My word shall accomplish that which I purpose (Isa. 55.11) 2. §3 Before the world existed (Jn 17.5) 2. §4 The light shines in the darkness (Jn 1.5) 2. §5 All things came into being through him (Jn 1.3) 2. §6 The Word pitched a tent among us (Jn 1.14) 2. §7 The glory as of a father’s only son (Jn 1.14) 2. §8 Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (Jn 1.17) 2. §9 With God … in the bosom of the Father (Jn 1.1, 18) 2. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

13 13 14 17 19 22 24 26

27 27 29 30 32 34 35 36 37 39 40

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Chapter 3 FROM LAMPLIGHT TO DAWN 3. §1 He came as a witness (Jn 1.7) 3. §2 In the wilderness (Jn 1.23) 3. §3 I baptize with water (Jn 1.26) 3. §4 The friend of the bridegroom (Jn 3.29) 3. §5 I myself did not know him (Jn 1.31, 33) 3. §6 A burning and shining lamp (Jn 5.35) 3. §7 The Lamb of God (Jn 1.29, 36) 3. §8 The Spirit descending from heaven like a dove (Jn 1.32) 3. §9 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

43 43 44 45 47 48 49 50 52 52

Chapter 4 FROM WILDERNESS TO FERTILE LAND 4. §1 Jesus decided to go to Galilee (Jn 1.43) 4. §2 A land that God looks after (Deut. 11.12) 4. §3 Sitting under the fig tree (Jn 1.48) 4. §4 Son of God, King of Israel (Jn 1.49) 4. §5 To rule the world in holiness and righteousness (Wis. 9.3) 4. §6 There was a wedding (Jn 2.1) 4. §7 On the third day (Jn 2.1) 4. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

55 55 56 58 59 61 63 65 66

Chapter 5 AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH 5. §1 Jesus went up to Jerusalem (Jn 2.13) 5. §2 The Passover of the Jews was near (Jn 2.13) 5. §3 No more traders in God’s house (Zech. 14.21) 5. §4 Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night (Jn 19.39) 5. §5 The kingdom of God (Jn 3.5) 5. §6 The on-Earth-things (Jn 3.12) 5. §7 The serpent lifted up in the wilderness (Jn 3.14) 5. §8 Eternal Life (Jn 3.16) 5. §9 God so loved the world (Jn 3.16) 5. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

69 69 70 71 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Chapter 6 LIVING WATER 6. §1 He came to a Samaritan city (Jn 4.5) 6. §2 Are there not twelve hours of daylight? (Jn 11.9) 6. §3 If you knew the gift of God (Jn 4.10) 6. §4 Bread from heaven and water from the rock (Neh. 9.15) 6. §5 To drink of the water that Jesus gives (Jn 4.14) 6. §6 The water that had become wine (Jn 2.9)

81 81 83 85 87 88 90

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The one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps (Amos 9.13) What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

91 92

Chapter 7 MY FATHER HAS NEVER CEASED WORKING 7. §1 A pool called Bethzatha (Jn 5.2) 7. §2 The Son gives life to whomever he wishes (Jn 5.21) 7. §3 He was calling God his own Father (Jn 5.18) 7. §4 The Son does only what he sees the Father doing (Jn 5.19) 7. §5 Now that day was a Sabbath (Jn 5.9) 7. §6 The Father who dwells in me does his works (Jn 14.10) 7. §7 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

95 95 96 97 99 100 102 102

Chapter 8 THE BREAD OF LIFE 8. §1 The Sea of Galilee of Tiberias (Jn 6.1) 8. §2 There was a great deal of grass in the place (Jn 6.10) 8. §3 Five barley loaves and two fish (Jn 6.9) 8. §4 The poor shall eat and have their fill (Ps. 22.26) 8. §5 Gather up the fragments that nothing may be lost (Jn 6.12) 8. §6 They saw Jesus walking on the sea (Jn 6.19) 8. §7 Believe in the one whom God has sent (Jn 6.29) 8. §8 I am the bread of life (Jn 6.35, 48) 8. §9 My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink (Jn 6.55) 8. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

105 105 106 108 109 111 112 113 114 116 117

Chapter 9 AT THE FESTIVAL OF TABERNACLES 9. §1 You shall live in booths for seven days (Lev. 23.42) 9. §2 You give them drink from the river of your delights (Ps. 36.8) 9. §3 Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water (Jn 7.38) 9. §4 He said this about the Spirit (Jn 7.39) 9. §5 I am the light of the world (Jn 8.12) 9. §6 To belong to the house (Jn 8.35) 9. §7 Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day (Jn 8.56) 9. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

121 121 123 124 126 127 129 130 131

Chapter 10 THE GOOD SHEPHERD 10. §1 A man blind from birth (Jn 9.1) 10. §2 He is of age (Jn 9.21) 10. §3 To know Jesus Christ whom God has sent (Jn 17.3) 10. §4 My servant David shall be their shepherd (Ezek. 34.23)

135 135 136 137 138

6. §7 6. §8

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10. §5 10. §6 10. §7 10. §8

I came that they may have life (Jn 10.10) The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (Jn 10.11) At the Festival of the Dedication (Jn 10.22) What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

139 141 142 144

Chapter 11 FROM BETHANY TO JERUSALEM 11. §1 Let us go to Judea again (Jn 11.7) 11. §2 I am the resurrection (Jn 11.25) 11. §3 Already there is a stench (Jn 11.39) 11. §4 To gather into one the dispersed children of God (Jn 11.52) 11. §5 Lazarus was one of those at table with Jesus (Jn 12.2) 11. §6 Six days before the Passover (Jn 12.1) 11. §7 A pound of costly perfume (Jn 12.3) 11. §8 The house was filled with the fragrance (Jn 12.3) 11. §9 Jesus found a young donkey (Jn 12.14) 11. §10 They took branches of palm trees (Jn 12.13) 11. §11 The world has gone after him (Jn 12.19) 11. §12 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

147 147 147 149 150 152 152 153 155 156 157 158 159

Chapter 12 THE HOUR HAS COME (JN 12.23) 12. §1 Some Greeks ask to see Jesus (Jn 12.20-21) 12. §2 A grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die (Jn 12.24) 12. §3 Where I am, there will my servant be also (Jn 12.26) 12. §4 Jesus ‘lifted up from the earth’ (Jn 12.32) 12. §5 I will draw all things to myself (Jn 12.32) 12. §6 Isaiah saw his glory (Jn 12.41) 12. §7 Saviour of the World (Jn 3.17; 4.42; 12.47) 12. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

161 161 162 163 164 165 167 168 169

Chapter 13 EAT, FRIENDS, AND DRINK (SONG 5.1) 13. §1 Jesus began to wash the disciples’ feet (Jn 13.5) 13. §2 You ought to wash one another’s feet (Jn 13.14) 13. §3 Come! Have a meal! (Jn 21.12) 13. §4 The poor shall eat and have their fill (Ps. 22.26) 13. §5 Love one another (Jn 13.34) 13. §6 A home in the Father’s house (Jn 14.2) 13. §7 I am the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14.6) 13. §8 Even greater works (Jn 14.12) 13. §9 My peace I leave with you (Jn 14.27) 13. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

173 173 174 175 177 179 181 182 183 185 186

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Chapter 14 I STILL HAVE MUCH TO SAY TO YOU (JN 16.12) 14. §1 The vine shall yield its fruit (Zech. 8.12) 14. §2 My beloved had a vineyard (Isa. 5.1) 14. §3 You do not belong to the world (Jn 15.19) 14. §4 The sin of the world (Jn 1.29) 14. §5 A woman in labour has pain (Jn 16.21) 14. §6 That your joy may be complete (Jn 16.24) 14. §7 That they may all be one (Jn 17.21) 14. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

189 189 190 192 193 194 196 197 197

Chapter 15 LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH (SONG 8.6) 15. §1 Across the Kidron Valley (Jn 18.1) 15. §2 A place where there was a garden (Jn 18.1) 15. §3 Hail, King of the Jews! (Jn 19.3) 15. §4 It was the day of Preparation for the Passover (Jn 19.14) 15. §5 A sponge full of wine (Jn 19.29) 15. §6 For my clothing they cast lots (Jn 19.24) 15. §7 Jesus hands over the Spirit (Jn 19.30) 15. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28)

201 201 202 203 205 207 208 210 211

Chapter 16 I HAVE COME TO MY GARDEN (SONG 5.1) 16. §1 A sudden flow of water (Jn 19.34) 16. §2 A fountain opened for the house of David (Zech. 13.1) 16. §3 A mixture of myrrh and aloes (Jn 19.39) 16. §4 In linen cloths (Jn 19.40) 16. §5 There was a garden in the place where he was crucified (Jn 19.41) 16. §6 The tree of life (Gen. 3.24) 16. §7 Early on the first day of the week (Jn 20.1) 16. §8 For now the winter is past (Song 2.11) 16. §9 See, I am making all things new (Rev. 21.5) Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

213 213 215 216 218 218 219 220 222 223 225 231 245

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author’s gratitude is due to many people who provided assistance and encouragement for the writing of this book, especially Prof. Maureen Junker Kenny, Head of the Department of Religions and Theology at the author’s university, Trinity College Dublin. The author would like also to thank the Series Editor, Prof. Norman C. Habel, for entrusting the Fourth Gospel volume of the Earth Bible Commentary to her and the series editorial board member with responsibility for the New Testament volumes, Prof. Elaine Wainwright, for her constant help and advice throughout the process of research and writing. Many other friends and colleagues recommended reading matter, lent books, or kindly responded to email queries: Professors David Ford, John R. Bartlett, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Hava Tirosh Samuelson, Jenny Morton, Stephanie Dalley, Robert J. Karris, Daniele Pevarello, Brian McGing, Thomas R. Whelan, and Cistercian Sisters Maria Thérèse Brosnan and Eleanor Campion. The subject librarian for biblical studies and theology at Trinity College Dublin, Mr Brian O’Connell, was unfailingly helpful. Prof. Cathriona Russell, Prof. Norman Habel, Dr Veronica Lawson and Dr Lomán MacAodha kindly read through a full draft of the book and offered insightful comments that resulted in a much improved final text. The efficiency and helpfulness of the staff at Bloomsbury T&T Clark, especially Dominic Mattos, Sarah Blake and Beth Williams, along with Leeladevi Ulaganathan and Deepika Davey of the project management team at Deanta, is much appreciated. Special thanks is due to Dr Seán McDonagh who invited the author to succeed Prof. Seán Freyne in teaching the biblical module in a masters’ programme in ecology and religion. This invitation first set her on the path of reading the Bible from an ecological perspective. Prof. Freyne’s advice and encouragement during the early stages of the writing continued to inspire and sustain the work even after he passed away in 2013. But above all, it was the steadfast and patient support of the author’s husband Michael J. S. Denton that saw this commentary through to completion.

ABBREVIATIONS 1 Apol. 1 Clem. ABD Adv. Haer. Ag. Ap. Alleg. Interp. Ant. Ap. Trad. Apoc. Abr. Aram. Barn. CBQ Creation DBM Dial. Did. Dreams DUJ Eccl. Hist. Embassy Ep. F & ES Bulletin Gen. Rab. Gos. Pet. Gos. Phil. Gos. Thom. Gk Heb. Heir ITQ Jub. J.W. LAB Lat. Laudato Si’ Let. Aristeas Louw and Nida LCL LXX

Justin, First Apology The First Letter of Clement D. N. Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary Irenaeus, Against Heresies Josephus, Against Apion Philo, Allegorical Interpretation Josephus, Jewish Antiquities The Apostolic Tradition Apocalypse of Abraham Aramaic The Letter of Barnabas Catholic Biblical Quarterly Philo, On the Creation of the World Deltion Biblikon Meleton Justin, Dialogue with Trypho The Didachē Philo, On Dreams Durham University Journal Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Philo, On the Embassy to Gaius Epistle/Letter Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Bulletin Genesis Rabbah Gospel of Peter Gospel of Philip Gospel of Thomas Greek Hebrew Philo, Who is the Heir? Irish Theological Quarterly Jubilees Josephus, Jewish War Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Biblical Antiquities) Latin Francis (Pope), Encyclical Letter 2015 Letter of Aristeas Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains Loeb Classical Library The Septuagint

xvi m.Tamid Mek., Šabb. Midr. Teh. Moses NEB Neot NIV NJB NovT NRSV Odes Sol. OTP Pan PIBA PsSol. QE QG RSV Sanh. Sotah Sukkah Spec. t. Test. Abr. Tib. Worse y.

Abbreviations Mishnah, tractate Tamid Mekilta, Shabbat Midrash Tehillim Philo, On the Life of Moses The New English Bible Neotestamentica New International Version The New Jerusalem Bible Novum Testamentum New Revised Standard Version The Odes of Solomon J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Epiphanius, Panarion/Against Heresies Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association Psalms of Solomon Philo, Questions and Answers on Exodus Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis Revised Standard Version Tractate Sanhedrin Tractate Sotah Tractate Sukkah Philo, On the Special Laws Tosefta Testament of Abraham Suetonius, Tiberius Philo, That the Worse Attacks the Better Jerusalem Talmud

I NTRODUCTION: A N E ARTH- C ONSCIOUS R EADING

§1 Look around you, and see! (Jn 4.35) A story shared by a friend about her experience of being surprised by a familiar Fourth Gospel passage may help to explain what this Earth-conscious reading of the gospel attempts to do. While listening to the Good Friday liturgical reading of the Johannine account of Jesus’ crucifixion at a time of concern for a nephew going through a difficult time and for his worried mother, she was suddenly struck by the words, ‘Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister’ (Jn 19.25). This was by no means her first time to hear this sentence, but it was her situation that made her notice that, according to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus had an aunt who wanted to be an empathetic presence for her nephew and her sister at this painful moment. In a similar way, someone purposefully making of the contemporary ecological crisis a situation in which to listen to the Fourth Gospel has heard things that she never noticed before. The process of becoming attuned to these resonances in the gospel owes much to predecessors in the emerging field of ecological hermeneutics, such as the Earth Bible Team, the contributors to the Harvard volumes on World Religions and Ecology, members of the SBL Seminar on Ecological Hermeneutics and the scholars involved in the Exeter project on ‘Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics’. This Introduction explains the main principles and strategies learnt from these colleagues that seemed to work for this particular reader in her attempt to respond to the Johannine portrayal of Jesus as an ecologically alert reader. Behind The Earth Bible Commentary project lies the conviction that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures have significant potential to be a resource for an imaginative, committed and effective response to a major contemporary challenge: the ecological depredation of our planet. Even among the scientists concerned about this crisis, there is widespread recognition of the capacity of religions to shape people’s attitude towards the Earth. As the Foreword to the proceedings of a major international and interfaith colloquium on the environment, sponsored by the University of Harvard, puts it, ‘Religions provide basic interpretive stories of who we are, what nature is, where we have come from, and where we are going.’1

1. M. E. Tucker and J. Grim, ‘Religions of the World and Ecology’, in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans (ed. D. T. Hessel and R. Radford Ruether; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xvi.

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In other words, by offering their adherents a view of the origins and purpose of the world and of their place within it – a cosmogony and a cosmology, each with its inherent ethical implications – religions may well have an important role to play in the repairing and sustaining of Earth. Biblical scholars are, therefore, at the forefront of an international and interfaith religious movement, as they try to develop ways of reading the Bible that will inspire among those who revere it as Holy Scripture greater care for Earth. This is not merely a matter of drawing ecological morals or applications out of the Scriptures. It is rather an attempt to allow the actual process of interpreting the Scriptures from an ecological perspective to transform us, its readers. For this reader, being invited to teach ‘Ecology and the Bible’ at post-graduate level was the beginning of the process. The subsequent years of ecological learning combined with close reading of the Fourth Gospel have gradually changed her way of thinking and acting as a homemaker, a grandmother, a shopper, a citizen, a voter and a gardener. In the course of this learning she has become convinced that the Fourth Gospel portrayal of Jesus is particularly ‘good news’ for the Earth. Her hope now is that this commentary may, to use a Johannine term, testify to this.

§2 I have set you an example (Jn 13.15) The complexities of the environmental crisis, especially its inextricable connection with our present global economic structures confront us with an ethical morass. Can the Fourth Gospel provide us with guidance? The problems – or at least the challenges – of trying to read it from an ecological perspective are apparent even from the opening verses. It has been suggested that the prologue may actually ‘devalue Earth’ (Chapter 2, §6). Then there is what many see as the gospel’s pervasive dualism showing through in antitheses between flesh and spirit, above and below, the heavenly and the earthly, ‘of this world’ and ‘not of this world’. To compound that, there is the apparent otherworldliness of the Johannine Jesus who seems airily unconcerned about the ethical issues that the synoptic Jesus confronts: justice, care for the poor, detachment from greed – all of which, in an ecological reading, would lend themselves to the consideration of intergenerational justice and to extension beyond purely human concerns to those affecting the wider Earth community. In fact, the Fourth Gospel hardly addresses practical issues at all. The one ethical command of the Johannine Jesus, ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (Jn 13.34; 15.12), seems anthropocentric and even somewhat tainted by Johannine sectarianism. The saying – ‘I have come that they may have life and have it to the full’ (10.10) – is sometimes put forward as an ‘Earth-friendly’ saying of Jesus, frequently though with blithe disregard for its context in the gospel and all too facile a certainty that it inculcates a Christian environmental ethics. So is there any ethical teaching in the Fourth Gospel that could be interpreted within an ecological frame? The author clearly intends to influence the audience’s attitude and behaviour. This is achieved in the Fourth Gospel, not by specific ethical directives, but by means

Introduction: An Earth-Conscious Reading

3

of what we might call a narrative ethics, or even an aesthetic ethics, because it is through consummate mastery of the literary craft of narrative that the author creates a character – the Johannine Jesus – who exemplifies an ethical orientation for the intended audience. As Michael Labahn explains in his contribution to the volume, Rethinking the Ethics of John, the Johannine story ‘aims at developing a certain model reader who is able to draw the right moral conclusions from the narrative … the narrative encourages an ethical creativeness driven by a distinctive relationship to Jesus Christ’.2 This seems to be a helpful model because we are trying to do something new and creative here. If the Earth-affirming features of the Johannine portrayal of Jesus can be recognized, then that ‘ethical creativeness’ of which Labahn speaks will have to include ecological responsibility. This book will attempt to show that the Fourth Gospel does indeed offer its Earth-conscious readers a vision – a world view – that challenges them to ask, What must we do if we are to work as God would have us work (Jn 6.28) in our ecologically degraded world?

§3 His disciples remembered that it was written (Jn 2.17) At first glance, a gospel – and indeed the New Testament generally – seems to have less potential for a reading from an ecological perspective than the Hebrew Bible with its more obviously ‘ecological’ passages: creation narratives, for example, laws providing for the land’s Sabbath rest, nature poetry in the psalms, proverbs based on observation of the world, the divine speeches in Job. But that is only until we remember that for the early believers in Jesus, the Scriptures of Israel were presupposed. This is particularly true of the Fourth Gospel. It sets Jesus’ story within Israel’s great story that tells in narrative, poem, song and vision of God’s design for the creation, a plan which was eventually to include, as the Evangelist will claim, the creating and sustaining Word coming from the heavenly realm to Earth. This overarching biblical story, giving a comprehensive explanation of the world and everything in it, has profoundly shaped the Johannine portrayal of Jesus. The Scriptures give us access to the wellsprings of wisdom and the vision of Earth that Jesus was brought up to live by. Much biblical insight, imagery and legislation can be traced back to the observations of farmers coping with a climate that favours desertification and learning to respect the limitations of the land: realizing, for example, that the minimal topsoil above the calcareous bedrock would soon turn to pavement if overused, or that only careful management would turn a macchia into productive land.3 The biblical witness to this Israelite respect

2. M. Labahn, ‘It’s Only Love – Is that All? Limits and Potentials of Johannine “Ethics” – A Critical Evaluation of Research’, in Rethinking the Ethics of John (ed. J. G. van der Watt and R. Zimmermann; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), pp. 3–43 (42–3). 3. A. Hütterman, ‘Ecology in Ancient Judaism’, in The Encyclopaedia of Judaism (ed. J. Neusner, A. J. Avery-Peck and W. S. Green; 4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2005) I, pp. 690–701 (691–2).

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for the land challenges quite a few of the myths we live by today: our notion that the world’s resources exist purely for the benefit of humankind; our trust in the ‘omnicompetence’ of science; our presumption that just because we have the technology to modify natural processes, we have the right to do so; ‘the fantasy that human ingenuity runs up against limits only to overcome them’4; ‘the notion that all natural things are valueless in themselves, merely pretty extras, expendable, either secondary to human purposes, or actually pernicious’,5 to mention just a few. There is, however, a more fundamental reason why an Earth-conscious reading of the Fourth Gospel must be attentive to the Scriptures. Awareness of the gospel’s literary and theological dependence on them draws us into Jesus’ own Israelite reading of the ‘book’ of the creation and its processes as the primary manifestation of God. There is, as Leonardo Boff explains, a fundamental connection between the Scriptures and the creation. The sacred texts and traditions that attest to revelations are only possible because the sacred and the revelation are first in the world. It is because they are there that they can be in the inspired books and in the rituals of religions. It is the same God who speaks in both places. That is why ultimately there cannot be contradiction between the book of the world and the book of the scriptures.6

The revelatory quality of the creation is central to this gospel where natural features such as water or light so frequently become symbols of Jesus who is himself the ‘symbol of God’.7 A crucial feature of an ecological reading of the Fourth Gospel will therefore be recognition of its rootedness in the Scriptures of Israel. The concept of intertextuality, developed in twentieth-century literary theory, provides an excellent model for understanding how no piece of writing can ever be completely original. Our word ‘text’ (that can refer to both oral and written material) derives from the metaphor of weaving, texture and textile being cognates. In composing a piece of writing, authors intuitively and even unconsciously weave into it their memory of earlier texts. Authors also presume that certain texts make up a presupposition pool that they share with their intended audience who will be knowledgeable enough to be able to pick up references to these texts and grasp their significance instinctively.8 The author of the Fourth Gospel, like all the Evangelists, presupposes an audience familiar with the Scriptures of Israel. Whenever in the Fourth Gospel there is a

4. E. F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 31. 5. M. Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 174. 6. L. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (New York: Orbis, 1997), p. 151. 7. R. Haight, Jesus, Symbol of God (New York: Orbis, 2001). 8. For more detail on intertextuality, see M. Trainor, About Earth’s Child: An Ecological Listening to the Gospel of Luke (Earth Bible Commentary 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), pp. 40–61.

Introduction: An Earth-Conscious Reading

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reference to what is written, the Hebrew Bible – the Law, the Prophets and the Writings – is in view. Of all four gospels, the Fourth is possibly the most explicit in its claim that knowledge of the Scriptures is the key to an understanding of Jesus (Jn 5.39). Even when not formally cited, the Scriptures can still be heard, their audibility ranging from the loud and clear of verbal allusion, through more covert thematic allusion, to the merest hint or echo. Allusions and echoes may even have been quite unintentional on the author’s part, yet for that very reason, they are particularly interesting, because they allow us, the readers, to hear what has come unconsciously to the author’s mind and shaped the author’s thought. Being on the lookout for intertextual reference to the Scriptures is a good start towards reading the gospel from an ecological perspective. Often the discovery of the scriptural source of one of the Evangelist’s ideas will reveal the extent to which a biblical portrayal of some feature of the created world has been influential. The most obvious example of this is the cosmology associated with the Jerusalem temple, revered as the place of God’s life-giving presence at the centre of the Earth. In the gospel, it is the body of Jesus, in all its materiality, that fulfils the vision of ‘a creation centred on the Creator’ that the design of the temple was originally conceived to express.9 Often too the scriptural background to a motif, such as shepherding or viticulture, can raise what the Earth Bible Team calls ‘the voice of Earth’ to audibility.10 For our ecological reading, therefore, echoes of biblical passages where features of the more-than-human world figure prominently will be a rich resource. Unless otherwise stated, the NRSV is used in all biblical quotations. The designation ‘the Lord’ is retained in quotations, on the understanding that there is no implication of gender in the divine Name that it attempts to translate.

§ 4 You search the Scriptures (Jn 5.39) The theory of intertextuality highlights the fact that every piece of writing comes to us as a text[ile] into which multicoloured threads of interpretation of earlier and later texts are woven. In the case of the Scriptures of Israel, as the principal intertext for the Fourth Gospel, we assume that the Evangelist had both a direct and a mediated knowledge of them. We have numerous haggadic and halakhic works, dating from the centuries around the turn of the era, in which the Scriptures are rewritten and expanded upon. In the first century CE, when the canon was still relatively fluid, many of these works were regarded as scriptural. Some of them even made their way into early Christian manuscripts of the Bible. When we realize that, for the vast majority of people in the ancient world, the Scriptures were received aurally, it is easy to understand how the distinction between the

9. M. Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010), p. 28. 10. N. C. Habel, Readings from the Perspective of Earth (The Earth Bible 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 46–8.

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actual Scriptures and biblical commentary, paraphrase or elaboration would have become blurred. In fact, even to speak of ‘the actual Scriptures’ does not sufficiently acknowledge the fact that the transmission of the Scriptures has always been done by communities that left their imprint on the text as they adapted it so that it would speak to their contemporary situation. The work of the Chronicler, the Septuagint and the biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are obvious examples of this traditioning process. Our Earth-conscious reading of the Fourth Gospel will therefore draw on material belonging to the genres of Midrash and Targum, on pseudepigraphical works such as Jubilees, 1 Enoch and the Letter of Aristeas, as well as on the writings of Hellenized Jews such as Jesus Ben Sira, Philo and Josephus. We will draw extensively on the Wisdom of Solomon (Greek Solomon). Whether the Evangelist actually knew this last work cannot be determined, but there are many commonalities between it and the gospel that, as John Ashton advises, ‘deserve to be emphasized’.11 These works show how the Scriptures were being interpreted in Greek-speaking Jewish circles during the late Second Temple period and, in some cases, around the time the gospel was written. The more we know of these works, especially those that deal with the creation and the ultimate destiny of the Earth, the better our prospects for discovering the view of the creation that informs the Johannine portrayal of Jesus. As part of the intertextuality of the Gospel, we recognize its Jewishness, in particular the way the narrative is entwined around the annual cycle of Israelite festivals, rooted in the Scriptures and in the seasonal rhythms of the Earth. Another intertextual feature of the Fourth Gospel is its connection with the other Johannine writings which are believed to stem from the same strand of the early Jesus movement. Sometimes these even appear to react or respond to each other. We will occasionally find that a passage in the First Letter of John or the Book of Revelation can illuminate a gospel passage. Without becoming involved in issues of priority or influence, we will simply highlight the intertextual commonalities whenever they can contribute to our eco-hermeneutical reading.

§5 To love all things that exist (Wis. 11.24) Our habit of taking Earth for granted has been reflected in our anthropocentric reading habits: our propensity for considering the landscape, the plants and the animals that figure in the gospel as mere background or incidental detail. Even in encountering the great Johannine symbols drawn from the more-than-human world – bread, water, light – we have tended to treat them like shells to be discarded once we have prised out the Christological insight that they contain. Our ecological reading will put them in the foreground, recognizing and respecting not just their

11. J. Ashton, ‘Riddles and Mysteries: The Way, the Truth and the Life’, in Jesus in Johannine Tradition (ed. R. T. Fortna and T. Thatcher; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 334–42 (340).

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value as symbols (what later theology would call their sacramentality) but their intrinsic value and goodness. The whole creation is loved into being by its Maker, the Lover of life (Wis. 11.24-26). This is the breadth of the love that Jesus has revealed and that he now sends his disciples to imitate. This reading will, therefore, highlight the materiality of the world of the text, noticing how the narrative reflects the particularity of a place such as Galilee, for example, where grass is lush, green, flecked with delicate wild flowers, and inviting to sit upon, only in the springtime, when the festival of Passover is at hand (Jn 6.10). We will also look out for the impact of first-century CE socio-economic and political realities on the land as portrayed in the text. As we do all this, we hope that our reading of the gospel with attentiveness to the Earth and everything that lives in it might spill over into a greater regard and respect for the ‘earthly things’ (3.12) that sustain and enhance our everyday lives. The events recounted in the gospel took place in a first-century CE Mediterranean ‘advanced agrarian subsistence society’.12 When we try to imagine locations in the narrative such as Galilee, Samaria and Jerusalem, as they would have been at particular times that are pinpointed in the gospel – Caiaphas’ term as High Priest (18–36 CE), or Pilate’s prefecture (26–36 CE) – we are dealing with the world of the text, the narrative world. It is important to remember though that we are seeing this place and this time through the eyes of an author living in another place at another time. Consequently, while the gospel does indeed preserve authentic historical memories and topographical information, it also reflects its author’s sociocultural and geographical situation, the actual location and time that the author and intended audience lived in: generally thought to be a Jewish Diaspora enclave in a Mediterranean city (possibly Ephesus?) in the latefirst-century Roman Empire. There are outcrops of this other world in the gospel text. The more we know about how people lived in it, and how they interacted with their more-than-human world, the better our prospects of reading the gospel in an ecologically perceptive way. In recent decades, studies of the gospels from a social science perspective have alerted us to the distance between our world and the ancient Mediterranean world where the Jesus movement took its rise. They have exposed our unthinking tendency to presume that we understand social scenarios depicted in the gospels. Linguists have also taught us that words with familiar social connotations for us may well have had quite different meanings for the ancients. An important part of studying a gospel, therefore, is learning about social realities: those underpinning the narrative and those inhabited by author(s) and intended audience(s). Thus a socio-rhetorical approach can be helpful for an Earth-conscious reading because in the worlds of text and author, as in our world, social realities always have an ecological impact. Then there is our situation today and the meaning that is created for us when we  read this gospel in our diverse geographical and social settings in the early

12. K. C. Hanson and D. E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), p. 9.

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twenty-first century CE. Obviously, there are as many worlds in front of the text as there are readers of it, so it is important for both author and readers of this commentary to identify and locate themselves geographically, socially and culturally. This reading is done by a New Zealand-born woman living in Ireland, in the European part of the economically advantaged third of the world that has done the most damage to the environment, yet has been able to afford, so far, to shield itself from the worst effects. Her location in this privileged but predatory part of the world makes her complicit, even if unintentionally, in the depredation of Earth. As we progress through the gospel we will employ an oscillating reading strategy, moving to and fro among these three intersecting worlds. Sometimes our focus will be on ecological aspects of the world within the narrative: the issues surrounding water supply in ancient Israel, for example, that the reference to Jacob’s well might broach (Jn 4.6). At other times we might, for example, try to imagine how Jesus’ promise of an inexhaustible supply of fresh water (4.10) might have sounded to someone whose daily tasks included filling her water jar from a city fountain fed by a Roman-built aqueduct. Then there will be times when that generous, clear, fresh water that courses through the gospel ‘like a silver thread’13 might reproach us for our complicity in the scandal that in our contemporary world polluted water causes the death of thousands of children every day.

§6 Written so that you may come to believe (Jn 20.31) A reading of the gospel such as this participates in the response of all the humanities to the ecological crisis.14 However, it is principally an engaged reading addressed to believers who look to the memories and interpretations of Jesus preserved in the gospel as a story that maps out a way to live in the Earth. The Fourth Gospel is written so that its audience may share its author’s faith (Jn 20.31). This commentary latches on to that motivational dimension of the gospel and channels it in an ecological direction. It is intended for people who name as God the originating source, beyond human comprehension, of the ten billion-year process required for the universe to bring the Earth into existence, and the five billion or so years that it took the Earth to become what it is today. It is written for people who acknowledge God as the ultimate reality that continues to sustain the universe in being, and who regard this creating and sustaining work as God’s self-disclosure. ‘God is the name we give to this mystery enveloping us on all sides and flowing over us in all realms.’15 This commentary addresses those whose approach to ecological issues

13. R. H. Lightfoot, St John’s Gospel: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 121. 14. D. K. Swearer (ed.), Ecology and the Environment: Perspectives from the Humanities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 15. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. 140.

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is shaped by their faith in God: people who, with Ellen Davis, regard ecological irresponsibility as ‘the undoing of what God has made and sustained’.16 More specifically, it is written for people who encounter the mystery of God, beyond all human capacity to imagine, revealed as Source, expressed as uttered Word and bestowed as outbreathed Spirit. It suggests that the Johannine portrayal of Jesus offers a paradigm, an example (13.15) that models how human beings might live well as part of God’s creation. To read the gospel in this way is not to suggest that Jesus or the early Christians had an ecological consciousness. We are attempting to tap into the ongoing generativity of this early Christian text, the meaning that lay a couple of thousand years ahead of it when it was first written, but that jumps off the page when we read the gospel in the twenty-first century. This is something that the Johannine strand of early Christianity understood well with its teaching about the Paraclete, the one who prompts and teaches the community of Jesus’ followers (Jn 14.26), whose guidance goes beyond what Jesus actually said to them (16.12-13). In the gospel, the Fourth Evangelist engages in quite a daring rereading of the Jesus tradition that attempts to respond to the presenting issues for a new audience living in a new situation: the expulsion of Jesus believers from synagogues (9.22; 12.42; 16.2). Christianity – along with all other world religions – is now entering its ecological phase.17 We are now challenged to do our own daring rereading of our defining texts that will resource us for the test that the ecological crisis presents, calling, as indeed it does, for ‘a whole new interpretation of what it means to be Christian’.18 Even though the series to which this book belongs is called ‘The Earth Bible Commentary’, this is not a verse by verse exposition. Since the gospel is more like variations on a theme than programme music (the rendering of a narrative in musical form), a different approach is called for. This is not just because the Evangelist is continually revisiting key themes and motifs but because the entire gospel is actually about the hour: the signs that point to it, the discourses that interpret it and the events that bring it to completion. So, while we will generally follow the ‘story line’, we will also quite frequently depart from the narrative sequence and group related passages together. This will allow us to discuss major Johannine theological tenets and symbols relevant to an Earth-conscious reading once, at an appropriate point in the commentary. At other occurrences a cross reference will point the reader to the chapter section containing the relevant material. In describing what he called the spiral nature of the gospel, its ‘self-contained allusiveness’, E. C. Hoskyns wrote of how we have to ‘master a vocabulary’ if we hope to make sense of John; how we have to know the whole gospel in order to understand its beginning; how we have always to bear in mind

16. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, p. 11. 17. M. E. Tucker, Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter their Ecological Phase (Chicago: Open Court, 2003). 18. J. F. Haught, ‘Christianity and Ecology’, in This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (ed. R. S. Gottlieb; New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 232–47 (235–6).

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what the author has already said if the significance of a word or scene is not to escape us altogether.19 This is a text that calls for re, re and re-readers! As Ingrid R. Kitzberger insightfully suggests, the blessing on those who believe without seeing (Jn 20.29), understood in the light of the Evangelist’s stated purpose in writing (20.31-32) actually means, ‘Blessed are those who read and re-read the gospel and believe.’20 This commentary assumes that its readers have some awareness of the Fourth Gospel as the product of a composition and transmission process in which several writers had a hand. On the understanding that the writing reflects the thinking of a community where women’s insights were valued, we use the traditional designation, ‘the Evangelist’, without necessarily implying that this anonymous believer was male. We also take for granted that the original author, revisers and redactors used the conventions for writing a life (Gk, bios) that they would have learnt as part of their Hellenistic education in rhetoric. Foremost among these was the technique of characterization (Gk, prosopopoeia: making the face) which included composing speeches for the various dramatis personae. This in no way detracts from the truth of the gospel which consists of the way it allows its readers to believe that the story has not only happened to the narrator, but that, in some way, it is happening to themselves as well.

§7 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) Our focus here is somewhat different from that of a strictly social-scientific or socio-rhetorical reading in which we would avoid anachronistically reading our own context back into the gospel. In this Earth-conscious reading we are positively on the alert for parallels between either the world of the narrative or the authorial world and our world today. Each chapter of this commentary will, therefore, conclude with a section highlighting moments in our reading when it seems that our contemporary experience converges with that of the characters, author or intended readers of the gospel. At the end of each chapter we will ask the question put to Jesus in the gospel: ‘What must we do if we are to carry out God’s work?’ (Jn 6.28 NJB). Jesus’ answer to that question – ‘Believe in him whom [God] has sent’ – may seem irrelevant to ecological concerns, but only if we forget that Johannine faith is always performative faith. The suggestions offered as to how we might do the work of God in our world today are subject to the limitations of this particular reader’s social, economic and geographical location. They make no pretensions to be any more than indications of the kind of reflection that readers

19. E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), pp. 66–7. 20. I. R. Kitzberger, ‘“How Can This Be?” (John 3:9): A Feminist-Theological Re-Reading of the Gospel of John’, in ‘What is John?’ Volume II: Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel (ed. F. F. Segovia; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), pp. 19–41 (40).

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of this commentary will be able to do far more effectively themselves in their own setting. Even if we are not professional scientists, we still bring to our reading of the gospel an understanding of the origins and workings, not only of the Earth but also of the universe that would have been unthinkable for the original intended audience. Readers of this book are likely to include in their knowledge considerable ecological awareness. Those of us who live in the privileged ‘one-third world’ certainly have enough basic facts and figures about the current ecological crisis to know that our excess – the most voracious lifestyle the Earth has ever been expected to provide for – is largely responsible for it. This is the context in which we approach the gospel as readers. The exciting prospect and challenge here is to make of our scientific knowledge and our awareness of our planet’s predicament a ‘hermeneutical lens’ through which we can look at the Fourth Gospel and see something new.

Chapter 1 S UPPOSING H IM TO B E THE G ARDENER

1. §1 To till and keep the garden (Gen. 2.15) The title of this Earth-conscious reading of the Fourth Gospel recalls Mary Magdalene (mis)taking the risen Jesus for the gardener when she meets him ‘early on the first day of the week’ in ‘the place where he was crucified’ where, we are told, ‘there was a garden’ (Jn 19.41; 20.15). This is an instance of the dramatic irony that the Fourth Evangelist delights in using, so that the audience will see a significance or a truth of which the character is unaware (4.12; 9.29; 11.49-50). In the case of Mary’s apparent mistake, this reading will try to do something like what artist Graham Sutherland did in his 1961 Noli Me Tangere painting for Chichester Cathedral. There Jesus is definitely the gardener; he even wears his gardener’s hat! For the intended audience, mention of a garden (Gk, kēpos: a field used for the cultivation of herbs, fruit, flowers; an orchard) would initially suggest a small intensely cultivated area near houses. However, given the symbolic nature of the gospel, it would also bring to mind the Garden of Eden, known to readers of the Greek Scriptures as ‘the Paradise of Delights’ (ho paradeisos tēs truphēs). The Greek word paradeisos is a transliteration of the Hebrew pardesh, a loanword from paridaeza, the Median form of the Old Persian paridaida, meaning a walled park.1 Paradeisos translates the Hebrew gan (garden, park) consistently in Genesis 2–3 and frequently elsewhere in the Septuagint. The gospel’s garden seems somewhat less impressive than a paradeisos, even if, in the Septuagint, an orchard (Song 4.13-15) and a grove of sacred oaks (Isa. 1.29-30) can be at once a kēpos and a paradeisos. Josephus too wrote of the Roman destruction of the paradeisoi of Judah – more likely to have been kēpoi (J.W. 6.6). At the figurative level, however, the Johannine garden is paradise; this ‘land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden’ (Ezek. 36.35 NRSV; LXX: hōs kēpos truphēs) and in it stands the risen Jesus, the new Adam. In fact, this evocative scene where a man and a woman meet in a garden abounds in the Edenic resonances that have been audible throughout

1. J. N. Bremner, ‘Paradise: From Persia, via Greece, into the Septuagint’, in Paradise Interpreted: Representations of Biblical Paradise in Judaism and Christianity (ed. G. P. Luttikhuizen; Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 1–20 (2).

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the gospel, all pointing to the Evangelist’s awareness of the ‘return to Eden’ motif widely used in Jewish writings of the late Second Temple period to describe the expected restoration of Israel. This hope for what was envisaged as a renewal of the entire creation included the belief that if Israel would only recover wisdom – particularly through cherishing the gift of Torah – and share that wisdom with all nations, then humankind would return to tending the garden of the Earth as the Creator originally intended (Gen. 2.15). The Fourth Evangelist sees this hope as now fulfilled in Jesus and the circle of those who belong to him. This study, therefore, invites its readers to suppose that Jesus is the gardener. As the gardener, he is the son who has learnt how to do gardening work from his gardener-Father, who planted the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2.8), who cares for the land by sending the seasonal rains from heaven (Deut. 11.11-12), who waters the furrows of the grain fields, softening them with showers (Ps. 65.9-13), the cultivator (Gk, geōrgos: one who engages in the cultivation of land; from gē: land and ergon: work; Jn 15.1; Chapter 14, §2). So this reading of the Fourth Gospel suggests that as ‘the gardener’ – someone totally aligned with the Creator’s intentions for the flourishing of the creation – Jesus can be a model and an inspiration for his twenty-first-century followers who are learning to see Earth care as a constitutive part of their life as his disciples. As Norman Wirzba explains, Gardening work creates in us an indispensable ‘imaginary’ that enables us to think, feel and act in the world with greater awareness for life’s complexity and depth. Gardens are the concentrated and focused places where people discover and learn about life’s creativity and interdependence. Insofar as we are good gardeners we will commit to working with God’s creativity in ways that strengthen human and nonhuman life together. When we garden poorly or recklessly, we will inevitably lay waste the world.2

1. §2 God planted a garden in Eden (Gen. 2.8) When the gospel’s first hearers picked up its allusions to biblical Eden, what image might they have had of it? What knowledge of garden lore and what actual experience of gardens might they themselves have called upon when envisaging this ‘paradise of delights’? Is it possible for us, as ecologically alert readers, to access the ancient memories of gardens that would have affected the way Eden was imagined in late Second Temple Judaism? There is evidence going back to at least 3000 BCE for two types of gardens in the ancient Near East: walled kitchen gardens or orchards near houses and more extensive royal pleasure gardens which were closer to what we today would regard as parks. Features of both would most probably have been in the minds of the first readers of the gospel when they

2. N. Wirzba, Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 37.

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thought of the Garden of Eden with its vegetation, both ‘pleasant to the sight and good for food’ (Gen. 2.9). Trees were a major feature of the pleasure garden, providing shade, emitting fragrance and bearing fruit (Ezek. 31.8-9). Animals were also kept there, for the royal hunt or for display. While evidence for kitchen gardens is limited mainly to documentary and representational data, for pleasure gardens we also have archaeological evidence in the form of stone constructions that have withstood the passing of millennia.3 For any garden to flourish in the heat and aridity of the Near East, a constant supply of water had to be ensured. Irrigation methods ranged from simple systems channelling water from springs or cisterns to plant beds in the kitchen garden – the water frequently being raised by a counter-weighted swing beam mechanism called a shādūf – to major hydraulic projects for the pleasure garden: vaulted aqueducts and inventive technologies, such as water wheels and screws that raised water to the top of terraced mounds, so that it could flow as ‘living water’ down into the garden’s numerous pools. The immensity of the earth moving, quarrying and stone dressing required for the creation of an ancient Near Eastern pleasure garden comes through in a description by the ninth century BCE Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II of the irrigation system that he had installed for the gardens surrounding his temple and palace complex at Nimrud: I dug out a canal from the Upper Zab, cutting through a mountain peak. … I watered the meadows of the Tigris and planted orchards with all kinds of fruit trees in the vicinity. I planted seeds and plants that I had found in the countries through which I had marched and in the highlands which I had crossed: pines of different kinds, cypresses and junipers of different kinds, almonds, dates, ebony, rosewood, olive, oak, tamarisk, walnut, terebinth and ash, fir, pomegranate, pear, quince, fig, grapevine …. The canal water gushes from above into the garden; fragrance pervades the walkways, streams of water as numerous as the stars of heaven flow in the pleasure garden. … Like a squirrel I pick fruit in the garden of delights.4

There is no mention of the thousands of slaves who did the digging, quarrying, planting and watering. The king is the gardener and this is an important feature of his royal image. In recent scholarship the fabled Hanging Garden of Babylon, a subject of interest to Greek and Roman authors writing around the turn of the era such as Strabo and Diodorus Siculus, and to Josephus (Ant. 10.11; Ag. Ap. 1.19), is identified with the raised garden at the palace built by the Assyrian king Sennacherib at

3. H. M. Leach, ‘Kitchen Gardening in the Ancient Near East’, in Garden History 10, 1 (1982), pp. 1–16. K. Polinger Foster, ‘Gardens of Eden: Exotic Flora and Fauna in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean’, Yale F & ES Bulletin 103 (1998), pp. 320–9. 4. S. Dalley, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 48.

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Nineveh – a city celebrated as a new ‘Babylon’ – around 700 BCE. Although the garden had been destroyed by Hellenistic times, the palaces with some of their sculptured panels portraying the garden could still be visited and portions of the aqueduct system were still visible.5 This garden must have been a typical Mesopotamian transformation of the natural environment, with multi-tiered artificial hills, a canal and aqueduct system bringing water from eighty kilometres away, with elaborate hydraulic systems to raise it twenty-five metres and feed it into watercourses and pools. In the garden grew rare trees and vines, with flowers and shrubs planted in roof gardens constructed on top of colonnades. There were kiosks (Persian: kūshk, pavilion) to provide shade for the people enjoying the garden. Statuary was also a feature of the ancient Near Eastern garden. Reliefs at the site of this ‘palace without rival’ show massive winged bulls being quarried and transported. Another example is the pleasure garden at Pasargardae built by the sixth century BCE Persian king Cyrus the Great, the conqueror of the Babylonians, who permitted the Israelites to return from exile. Since it was through the influence of Achaemenid culture that the words pardesh and paradeisos found their way into the Scriptures, the lore about this garden must have lived on well into the Hellenistic period. The archaeological remains of Cyrus’ garden and tomb are preserved to this day as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The making of a lush garden in the Morgab Plain, a terrain subject to violent winds and burning sun, was achieved by the construction of 900 metres of limestone water channels. The garden itself was laid out in four quadrants divided by waterways interspersed at fifteen-metre intervals with small pools, also carved out of limestone. According to Arrian (second century CE), Cyrus’ garden was a beautiful grove with all kinds of trees growing in it, streams flowing through it, and a large area of green grass surrounding it (Expedition of Alexander, VI, 29). The sheer magnitude of the logistics involved in constructing pleasure gardens meant that they were typically the preserve of rulers with slave labour to call upon. The enclosure of gardens – to keep unwanted animals out and domesticated or captive animals in – also made the point that what grew in gardens was not for the taking. Access to pleasure gardens on the part of the populace depended on rulers’ beneficence and this seems to have been granted, at least occasionally, as a form of royal propaganda. The exotic flora and fauna on display in a garden – brought from conquered lands or offered as tribute by subject peoples – were living proof of the royal owner’s rule over distant territories. The run-off of water from a royal garden would also have benefitted the adjacent royal city, providing fresh mountain water for drinking and allowing for the planting of the orchards around the city that ensured a supply of fresh fruit for the citizens. Thus a gardener-king was a source of life for his kingdom. For ancient people living in a harsh and arid environment, entering a pleasure garden – or even hearing it described – must have been an experience of an utterly transformed world, or even perhaps of a new, re-created

5. Dalley, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden, p. 202.

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world. The constant greenness of a paradise garden, even in seasons when the surrounding landscape was parched gave it an aura of intransience making the garden an apt symbol of eternal bliss. The water channelled into the garden, to save the plants and trees from withering away and to enable them to flourish symbolized the warding-off of death and the bestowal of life. In cultures where the dividing line between kings and gods was exceedingly fine, the transformation of nature achieved by a royal gardener would certainly have validated any claim he might make to godlike status.

1. §3 The king’s paradise (Neh. 2.8) In the land of Israel, only parts of the Jordan valley came anywhere close to the imagined fertility of the garden God planted (Gen. 13.10). However, the kings of Judah had their royal garden in the Kidron Valley (2 Kgs 25.4; Neh. 3.15), watered by the Kidron stream in winter and irrigated in the dry months by the waters of the Gihon Spring channelled from the pool of Siloam and possibly also from another spring outside Jerusalem called En-rogel. It is also quite possible that the original audience for the gospel knew of a famous imitation of Sennacherib’s garden: the palace garden of Herod the Great at Jericho constructed on a spectacular scale with ‘a pillared portico overlooking the garden … the highly visible viaduct, the artificial hill on which a smaller palace was built and the semi-circular terraces in the centre of the grand facade of the sunken garden’.6 Conduits serving the garden’s pools were built of mortared rubble covered with a layer of waterproof plaster, a new technology of the time providing an alternative to stone conduits.7 It is possible also that some of the audience might have heard of the terraced garden with an artificial lake surrounding the palatial Domus Aurea that Nero (ruled 37–68 CE) constructed in the centre of Rome. The pleasure garden seems to have been a new concept of horticulture introduced to the Israelites during their Babylonian captivity. The garden lore in the Bible is most certainly indebted to hearsay or perhaps even actual experience of it. The contrast between a paradeisos and the surrounding inhospitable desert terrain is a common biblical motif (Isa. 51.1-3 where stone quarrying for irrigation projects may possibly be evoked). In Balaam’s vision, Israel’s encampments are like gardens full of palm trees beside a river (Num. 24.6). Eden is watered by the river flowing out in four directions (Gen. 2.10) dividing the garden into four quadrants, just like Cyrus’ garden at Pasargardae. It is full of trees that are ‘pleasant to the sight and good for food’ (2.9). Adam’s role there as the gardener is that of an ancient Near Eastern monarch in his palace garden (2.15). In fact, the link between gardens and royalty is a consistent biblical theme. For pseudonymous king Solomon (Eccl. 1.1), making a test of every possible kind of pleasure includes constructing gardens

6. Ibid., p. 176. 7. J. P. Oleson, ‘Water Works’, in ABD VI, pp. 883–93 (889).

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(LXX: kēpous) and parks (LXX: paradeisous) and planting in them all kinds of fruit trees, making ‘pools from which to water the forest of growing trees’ (2.5-6). And, of course, there is the garden setting of pseudonymous Solomon’s Song of Songs (Song 4.13). For Ezekiel, a king at the height of his powers is ‘in Eden, the garden of God’ (Ezek. 28.13-14), flourishing like a beautiful cedar that sends down its roots to abundant waters, unrivalled in height and splendour by any of the other trees in ‘the garden of God’ where cedars, firs and plane trees thrive (31.3-9). The timber beams for the post-exilic reconstruction of the temple’s gates come from a royal plantation: ‘the king’s paradise’ (Neh. 2.8. NRSV ‘the king’s forest’; Heb., pardesh; Gk, paradeisos). The tragedy that befalls Adam and Eve, their banishment from the garden, becomes in exilic and post-exilic writings a metaphor for the exile. Conversely, the return from exile is often depicted as the return to Eden. For the Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isa. 51.3)

Even the reference to musical performance is part of the garden imagery. The sound of windswept trees is music to biblical poets’ ears (Ps. 96.12; Isa. 55.12). Moreover, as Psalm 137 shows, a shady waterside, whether natural or constructed, was an ideal setting for the enjoyment of singing. In the Scriptures we frequently find that royal gardens are walled, with gates for access (2 Kgs 25.4, Neh. 3.15; Esther 1.5; Jer. 39.4; 52.7). The theme of access to the garden, denied to Israel and then restored in a reversal of the expulsion from Eden, appears in The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs where an expected priest figure is to open the gates of paradise, remove the sword that has threatened since Adam and allow the holy ones to eat of the Tree of Life (T. Levi 18.10-11. See also 4 Ezra 8.52; Rev. 2.7; 22.14). Elsewhere the Testaments speak of the era of the temple’s restoration as a time when ‘the saints shall refresh themselves in Eden and the righteous shall rejoice in the new Jerusalem’ (T. Dan 5.12; see Rev. 21.2). All of this tends to convey the impression that garden has a positive value while wilderness is somehow negative. Yet many people today use the term wilderness for an area of exceptional natural beauty and fecundity to be enjoyed, cared for and conserved, often as a national park. Wilderness in this sense can actually be more like an ancient royal garden than a desert! Besides, advances in imaging technology have enabled us to learn that deserts actually teem with life. Many Earth-conscious readers of the Bible find the wilderness-garden antithesis anthropocentric, as if the fundamental contrast is between land unfit for human habitation and land that abundantly supplies human needs. It is important, however, not to overliteralize a metaphor that came instinctively to ancient people who knew how life threatening a desert could be and how wondrously life enhancing a garden could

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be. The biblical trope where garden becomes wilderness is frequently an image for the loss of Earth’s God-given sustenance through migration, exile and war, or for the desertification that occurs when greedy people neglect the wisdom that would have prevented exhaustion of the soil. Such loss and ruin of the land – a widespread reality in the Earth today – may certainly be included in ‘the sin of the world’ (Jn 1.29; Chapter 3, §7) that the Gardener will work to undo.

1. §4 The garden of God on the holy mountain (Ezek. 28.13-14) We come now to the connection of the Jerusalem temple with Eden. Remembering that the Evangelist and intended audience heard the Scriptures in the Greek version, it is significant that they would have thought that God settled Adam – and not the cherubim, as the Hebrew Bible has it – opposite (Gk, apenanti: over against, next to) the Paradise of Delight (Gen. 3.25 LXX). The Greek version appears to reflect here a developing belief that Eden was in the land of Israel.8 As this idea gathered momentum, the site of the Jerusalem temple would be invested with Edenic attributes and even, in some traditions, identified as the place where humankind was created. According to Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Gen. 2.7-9, the dust from which God formed Adam came from ‘the site of the sanctuary’.9 Moreover, it was ‘from the mountain of worship, the place whence he had been created’ that God took Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden.10 It would seem from Ps. 52.8 and 92.12-13 that there was a grove of trees (olive trees and palms) in the precincts of the first temple. The arboreal motifs mentioned in descriptions of the interior – the palm frond and open flower patterns (1 Kgs 6.32), the carvings of trees and flowers on the cedar panels (6.15, 18, 29), the cypress door (6.34-35) – carried through into the design and decoration of the Second Temple, were part of its Edenic ambience. In particular, the branched lampstand in the form of a stylized tree (Zech. 4.2), the menorah, symbolized the tree of life in the middle of the garden.11 Its light was ‘the light of life’ (see Jn 8.12), a glimpse of the divine light (Ps. 36.9). It seems that pilgrims to the temple festivals would buy ‘Jerusalem lamps’ to bring home with them. Pottery finds at archaeological digs in the Galilean sites of Yodefat and Gamla have shown that 78 per cent of the oil lamps dating from the first century CE came from Jerusalem. This is surprising as such lamps could easily be made locally. The explanation can only be what archaeologist Mordechai Aviam calls ‘a mystical, emotional and spiritual connection between the holiness of Jerusalem and light’. For Galilean Jews who

8. P. T. Lanfer, Remembering Eden: The Reception History of Genesis 3:22–24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 43. 9. M. Maher (trans.), Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible 1B; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), p. 22. 10. Maher (trans.), Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, p. 23. 11. C. Meyers, ‘Lampstand’, in ABD IV, pp. 141–3.

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used them in their homes and placed them in tombs, Jerusalem lamps must have somehow represented the holy light of the temple.12 The symbolic connection between Eden and the temple is particularly strong in the prophecies of Ezekiel, a source for much Johannine imagery. Ezekiel actually locates ‘Eden, the garden of God’ on the holy mountain of God (Ezek. 28.13-14). He describes in Edenic terms (Gen. 2.10-14) how the life-giving waters flowing from the temple make all of earth’s rivers fresh and full of fish, with all kinds of trees growing on their banks producing fruit for food and leaves for healing. And all of this is because this water flows from the sanctuary (Ezek. 47.7-12). This vision of the temple as the source of the water on which all life on Earth depends hyperbolizes an actual topographical feature of Jerusalem that will also feature prominently in the Fourth Gospel. As the symbolic identification of the temple as ‘Eden’ continued to exercise the Israelite religious imagination, the natural springs at the temple site were identified with the primeval deep. That meant that the temple was built on the foundations of the Earth – the pillars that reached down into the abyss beneath (Ps. 24.2; Jn 17.24). In some traditions, the temple site was the original area of dry land that God had separated from the waters and caused to produce vegetation on the third day of creation. Later Jewish writings preserve a legend about the waters of the abyss becoming threateningly visible when the foundations of the temple were being dug in King David’s time (b. Sukkah 53b). Thus, in this tradition, the temple is like a capstone preventing the deep from rising to inundate the Earth. In what is generally regarded as an exaggerated report, the Letter of Aristeas describes ‘an inexhaustible supply of water … as if, indeed, a strongly flowing natural spring were issuing from within [the temple]’. He also tells of underground reservoirs and claims to have heard the subterranean water roaring in the channels connected to the reservoirs, even at a distance of four stades (about 720 metres) from the city (Let. Aris. 89-91). Ben Sira’s mention of a water cistern and ‘a reservoir like the sea in circumference’ in the temple precincts (Sir. 50.3) may confirm the essentials of this description. Whether these authors have in mind Ezekiel’s Edenlike waters flowing out from the garden/temple or the primeval depths into which the foundations of the cosmos were fixed, or whether they are merely thinking of the practical function of these structures, it is clear that abundantly flowing water featured significantly in popular perceptions and memories of the temple complex. It is in the literature of late Second Temple Judaism that the symbolic connection between Eden and the temple really gains momentum, whether Eden is envisaged as a primeval temple, as the site of the actual Jerusalem temple, or as a foreshadowing of a future restored temple.13 Writers such as Jesus Ben Sira,

12. M. Aviam, ‘People, Land, Economy, and Belief in First Century Galilee and its Origins: A Comprehensive Archaeological Synthesis’, in The Galilean Economy in the Time of Jesus (ed. D. A. Fiensy and R. K. Hawkins; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 5–48 (33–5). 13. Lanfer, Remembering Eden, pp. 127–57.

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Josephus, Philo, Pseudo-Philo and the authors of Jubilees and 1 Enoch, who all reflect on the meaning of the temple and its rites, give us an idea of what the Temple would have meant to people treasuring their memories of it, post 70 CE, such as the intended audience of the Fourth Evangelist.14 Retellings of the Garden of Eden story in these later texts amplify it with details that enable us to see that at least some Jews living nearer to the time of the Fourth Gospel’s composition were hearing the Eden story as a story about the temple. In Jubilees, for example, the Garden of Eden is the holy of holies (Jub. 8.19). Adam was brought into it on the fortieth day after his creation, Eve not until the eightieth (3.9) because she observed the law requiring forty days’ purification before a woman who has given birth may enter the temple (Lev. 12.2-8). Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden was thus their exclusion from the sanctuary (see also Jub. 4.26; 8.12-21). These writings frequently connect the aromatic spices in the incense burned in the temple with the fragrant flora of Eden. According to Jubilees (3.27), on the day of his expulsion from Eden, Adam offered a sweet smelling sacrifice, thereby presaging the incense offering in the temple. In the Apocalypse of Adam and Eve (29.2-4), Adam, before leaving the garden, asks God for permission to gather herbs and spices to offer a fragrant sacrifice. All of this draws on the universal human experience that smells trigger deep and often forgotten memories. Human delight in perfumes and spices has its origins in the pleasure we derive from the natural aromas of trees and plants. In the biblical and post-biblical traditions we have been tracing, fragrances remind humanity of their origin in a garden. Today we can recognize that this mythopoetic idea has deep roots in our history as a species. As biologist John Feehan explains, forests are in our genes. Our remote ancestors were creatures of the forest. Our spirit is tuned to its sounds, its sights, its scents. It weaves itself around our very genetic makeup. … We are all made psychologically and indeed spiritually, in and by and for that kind of landscape.15

‘Smell is our most seductive and provocative sense … providing the single most powerful link to our distant origins.’16 It is a universal human experience that ‘odour-linked memories [are] impossible to forget’.17 Since so many aromatic products came from the bark or the resin of trees growing in far-off mysterious lands, it is not surprising that people assumed that they came from the trees of Paradise. Whenever the fragrance of the incense offering wafted through the temple, therefore, it brought back memories of the aromatic trees and shrubs of

14. See P. Alexander, ‘Early Jewish Geography’, in ABD II, pp. 977–88 (980–93). 15. J. Feehan, ‘The garden God walked in: Meditations on the spirit of trees’, Sedos Bulletin 43, 3 (2011), pp. 61–6 (63). 16. L. Watson, Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 3. 17. Watson, Jacobson’s Organ, pp. 177–83 (182).

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Eden. Invariably when Eden is remembered, its aromaticity is foremost, especially the invigorating, life-giving perfume emanating from the Tree of Life (4 Ezra 2.12). Enoch’s account of his journey through exotic groves to visit the Garden of Eden abounds in references to aromatic plants: mastic, cinnamon, sarara, galbanum, aloe, almond, nard, pepper, carob (1 Enoch 30-32). We will recall this when we come to the scent of Mary’s precious ointment filling the house (Jn 12.3; Chapter 11, §7–§8) and the aromatic spices used for Jesus’ garden burial (Jn 19.39-40; Chapter 16, §3).

1. §5 Heaven and earth completed and all their beauty (LXX Gen. 2.1) In line with the view of the temple as a ‘capstone’ restraining the waters of chaos, the temple liturgy ensured the stability of the creation. The annual cycle of festivals was rooted in the precarious experience of an ancient Near Eastern agrarian society: depending on God to send the rain that would bring the dry seasons to an end, but also trusting that God would never again allow over-abundant rain to destroy the Earth. This comes through strongly in Jesus Ben Sira’s description of Simon, son of Onias, high priest from 219 to 196 BCE. For Ben Sira, the emergence of the high priest after performing his liturgical functions was like the appearance of the rainbow in the sky (Sir. 50.7), a reminder of God’s covenant with Noah that ‘while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease’ (Gen. 8.22). From a similar perspective, PseudoPhilo would later stress the continuity between the temple cult of his day and the sacrifices offered from the time of Noah onwards whenever the rains came and the rainbow appeared in the sky to remind the people of God’s promise that the waters would never again submerge the Earth (LAB 4.5). Ben Sira also compares the emergence of the high priest on completion of his ritual tasks to the appearance in the sky of the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon and stars which were regarded as points of stability in the creation (Sir. 50.6-7; see Ps. 89.3637; 148.3-6). Ben Sira’s grandson even introduces into his Greek translation quite a strong echo of LXX Gen. 2.1: ‘And the heaven and earth were completed and all their beauty/order.’ While Hebrew Sirach speaks of the temple liturgy being completed, the Greek says that the kosmos was perfected (Sir. 50.19). Since kosmos can mean beauty, adornment or order, as well as world, Ben Sira’s grandson seems to be suggesting that the high priest’s completion (Gk: sunteleō, complete, perform a rite) of the impressive temple liturgy was somehow comparable to God’s completion of the work of creating and ordering the kosmos at the beginning.18 A similar comparison will be made with Jesus’ completion of his ‘work’ (Jn 19.30; Chapter 15, §7). The sight of the high priest surrounded by the other temple priests, like a cedar encircled by a garland of palm trees, is a vision of Eden, complete with fragrant flowers and fruit-bearing trees

18. C. T. R. Hayward, The Jewish Temple: A Non-Biblical Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 7–8.

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growing beside springs of water (Sir. 50.8, 10, 12). This, of course, implies that the high priest is an Adam figure, representing all humanity. Elsewhere Ben Sira uses these Edenic images in connection with divine Wisdom (Sir. 24.13-18). This makes perfect sense when we recall passages such as Prov. 8.22-31 where Wisdom is God’s agent in the creation and ongoing ordering of the world. So we find the temple liturgy representing Eden which in turn represents the world in its pristine state, so to speak: the whole creation as its Creator intended it to be. There is a confluence here with another strand of biblical traditions according to which the temple was a representation of the kosmos. Citing Isa. 65.17-18 where God’s creation of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ turns out to be the post-exilic creation of Jerusalem as a joy and her people as a delight, Jon D. Levenson explains that the reconstruction of the temple-city ‘was not only a recovery of national honor, but also a renewal of the cosmos, of which the Temple was a miniature’.19 A striking feature of biblical retellings of the Exodus story is that the destination of the journey begun at the original Passover is ultimately Jerusalem and its temple (Exod. 15.17; Ps. 78.54). During the wilderness journey God was accessible in the ‘tent of meeting’ constructed according to a detailed design that God had given to Moses. The temple in Jerusalem was the solid version of the ‘tent of meeting’ that could be built once Israel had settled in the land. Of course, this belief projects back to the days of the wilderness journey a much later priestly understanding of the Jerusalem temple. However, at the time of Jesus it was taken for granted that the layout of the temple not only went back to the desert tabernacle, but that the specifications for the tabernacle were themselves based on God’s design for the structure of the world, also revealed to Moses at Sinai. After all, it was argued, God must have told Moses how the world was created. Otherwise, how could he have acquired the knowledge that his ‘authorship’ of the Pentateuch would require? According to these traditions, the architecture, furnishings and layout of the temple were a representation of the whole creation. Josephus understood that, just as the firmament separated the created world from the heavenly realm, a veil in the temple separated the inner holy of holies – the holiest place, representing eternity, the non-material invisible world – from the outer part (Ant. 3.180-81). There were various theories explaining how the six stages in which Moses erected the desert tabernacle (Exod. 40.16-33) corresponded to the six days of creation.20 In this system, for example, the setting up of the menorah (40.24) corresponded to the fourth day on which God created the lights in the heavens. Commenting on the rabbinic idea that the world was not complete until the Jerusalem temple had gone up, but with relevance to our concerns here, Levenson writes, The point is not simply that the two projects, world building and temple building are parallel. Rather they implicate each other, and neither is complete alone. The

19. J. D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 89–90. 20. Barker, Creation, pp. 38–42.

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Maybe we might say, ‘a palace garden for the victorious king’ in view of the influence of all these ideas on the Johannine ‘temple of [Jesus’] body’ (Jn 2.21).

1. §6 The centre of the Earth (Ezek. 38.12) It is clear from many Jewish authors writing within a century or so from the composition of the Fourth Gospel that the temple was seen as a representation of the whole creation: Earth, skies and underworld. For Josephus, the three-part design of the temple, based on Moses’ tabernacle, corresponded to the threefold design of the creation: sea, earth and heaven (Ant. 3.180-182). For Philo, the whole universe was a temple with the heavens as its sanctuary and the temple made by hands was a representation of it. There thanksgiving was offered not only on behalf of all humankind, but to give expression to the worship offered by all the elements that make up the universe – earth, water, air and fire – a worship which consists simply of their being what God created them to be (Spec. 1.66-67). The seven lamps on the menorah in the temple, kept burning through the night, represented the stars (Spec. 1.296) whose arrangement in the heavens Philo understood in terms of the zodiac signs with their supposed influence on Earth’s seasons (QE 2.73-81). Josephus associates the twelve loaves known as the bread of the presence with these ancient astronomical signs that mark out the twelve months of the year. For him, the menorah with its seven lamps ‘represented’ the seven planets that would have been known in his time, including the sun and moon (Ant. 3.145146; J.W. 5.217). Its seventy portions correspond to the ten decans of each planet, the ten-degree portion of the Zodiac occupied and presided over by each planet (Ant. 3.182). For Josephus, the curtain at the entrance to the temple woven and embroidered in blue, linen, scarlet and purple was an image of the universe. The blue represented the air, the linen represented the earth (where flax grew), the scarlet represented fire, and the purple represented the sea (because purple dye comes from shellfish). Explaining that the embroidery represented a panorama of the star-studded night sky, however, Josephus is careful to point out that this depiction did not include the actual signs of the zodiac, avoiding any suggestion of a representation of animals which would have been regarded as idolatrous (J.W. 5.212-214; Ant. 3.180-182). For Philo the equal parts of the four ingredients in the incense specified by Moses (Exod. 30.34) – stacte, onycha, galbanum and frankincense – represent the four elements out of which the universe was completed – water, earth, air and fire. The combination of the ingredients into a single substance symbolizes the unity of

21. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, p. 99.

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everything in the universe (Heir 196-197, 199-200, 226). Josephus notes that the thirteen fragrant ingredients in the temple incense, coming from the sea and from the land both inhabited and uninhabited, signify that ‘all things’ (Gk, panta) are of God and for God (J.W. 5.218). The incense offering in the temple therefore symbolizes the thanksgiving that the whole universe, wrought by divine Wisdom, offers, simply by flourishing in the way that God intended, both with and without human input. In keeping with the perception of the arrangement of the temple and its furnishings as symbolizing the universe, the worship offered there was understood as giving expression to the worship offered by the universe. Josephus calls the temple liturgy ‘cosmic worship’ (Gk, kosmikē thrēskeia; J.W. 4.324), thereby highlighting the universal significance of the temple, far beyond the boundaries of Judaism. In their insistence on the beneficial effects of the worship offered in the temple for the whole world, human and more-than-human, Josephus and Philo were defending their nation against the accusation of xenophobia. Underlying their emphasis on the universal nature of the one temple as ‘common for all people, just as God is common for all people’ (Ag. Ap. 2.193) is another sense in which the temple was cosmic: the idea of an eventual pilgrimage of all the nations to Jerusalem, reflected in the inclusion in the temple’s design of a Court of the Gentiles. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ (Isa. 2.2-3; see Mic. 4.2)

The cosmic nature of the temple is a crucial pillar of the scriptural foundations for the Johannine claim that when Jesus is lifted up, he draws all people and even, according to some ancient manuscripts, all things (Gk, panta) to himself (Jn 12.32; Chapter 12, §5). For the Fourth Evangelist, the ‘temple of [Jesus’] body’ (2.21) has all of that magnetism that a Jewish audience would associate with the Jerusalem temple. This raises an important issue for our Earth-conscious reading: that of worldviews and mental maps. Ezekiel’s audience and subsequent generations of Jews, right up to the time the gospel was written, would have envisaged the Earth as a flat disc (Job 26.10; Prov. 8.27; Isa. 40.22), with its edge or end at the horizon. At the centre of the Earth was Jerusalem with its temple (Ezek. 5.5). Readers of the Greek Scriptures called Jerusalem ‘the navel of the Earth’ (Gk, omphalos: navel. See Ezek. 38.12, LXX; Jub. 8.19; 1 En. 26.1). This Jewish world view would persist until at least the sixteenth century of our era, as the ‘clover leaf ’ world maps show: with ‘Europa’, ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ as the three ‘leaves’ and Jerusalem at the centre.22 At the

22. For a German ‘clover leaf ’ map from 1581, see R. Rubin, ‘Vom Zentrum der Welt zur modernen Stadt Jerusalem im Spiegel seiner Karten’, in Das heilige Land auf Landkarten (ed. A. Tishby; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 25–39 (27).

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time of Jesus, this cognitive map – an exercise in theological cartography – was envisaged (and even possibly drawn, although no ancient visual representation of it seems to have survived) as follows: the outer circle of the Earth, with the holy land of Israel at its centre, with Jerusalem which was holier at the land’s centre, the temple which was even holier in the centre of the city, the various temple courts encircling, the holy of holies, the very centre of everything, the most sacred place on Earth.23 This symbolic cartography is presupposed in the literature of Second Temple Judaism. Aristeas, for example, locates Jerusalem at the centre of Judea (Let. Aris. 83), while Hecateus of Abdera sites the temple in the middle of the city (cited by Josephus in Ag. Ap. 1.198). In the first century CE the socioreligious implications of this mental map found expression in a classification of the population according to degrees of access to the Jerusalem temple, from the priests down, in decreasing order of purity, to people with various disabilities, Gentiles and women. As we will see, the Johannine claim that the real temple is Jesus’ body (Jn 2.21) challenges this demarcation of degrees of access to the divine presence in the temple.

1. §7 The temple of his body (Jn 2.21) For Johannine believers in Jesus, the idea that the temple replicated God’s design for the creation – where the divine is present invisibly at the centre of the material world – was the key to an understanding of Jesus as the Word made flesh, pitching a tent among us. It also explains how Jesus can speak of ‘the temple of his body’ (Jn 2.21) and how the living waters that flow from it (7.38; 19.34) can be understood as the life-giving presence of God, streaming out from the holy of holies into all the Earth. Wherever that river flows, every living creature thrives (Ezek. 47.9). The early years of the Jesus movement coincided with a time of concern over the corruption of the temple. The writing of the gospel reflects Jewish devastation over its eventual destruction in 70 CE. The Eden-inspired memories and hopes of those who longed for the true temple to be restored form part of the thought world out of which the Fourth Gospel emerged. Eden’s replication on Mount Zion gave expression to a vision of the creation centred on its Creator where humans learn how to collaborate in the divine work of sustaining the Earth. This commentary will try to show the potential of the distinctive Johannine ‘take’ on this vision to shape an ecological ethos, ‘rooted in the vision and symbols of the Christian community’.24

23. Alexander, ‘Early Jewish Geography’, p. 978. 24. Barker, Creation, pp. 28, 34; M. Coloe, God Dwells with Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001).

Chapter 2 I N THE B EGINNING

The gospel opens with what is arguably the most deep, dense and difficult passage in the New Testament, if not in the entire Bible. Rather than attempt to rehearse all the complexities of the prologue (Jn 1.1-18), we will limit our engagement to matters relevant to this particular reading. The result will be a fairly cursory treatment of this profound passage, but, it is hoped, not too daunting a beginning for our eco-hermeneutical journey through the gospel.

2. §1 A breath of the power of God (Wis. 7.25) The prologue is generally thought to quote a Jewish poem, homily or midrashic commentary on the opening of Genesis. The passages in much plainer language dealing with John the Baptist (Jn 1.6-8,15) seem not to be part of the original poem, so we will bracket them in the meantime (for discussion in Chapter 3, §1). In keeping with the custom of commenting on a Torah passage in light of a relevant passage from the Prophets or the Writings, this poet, who is obviously steeped in a tradition of wisdom speculation well documented in Jewish writings of the Second Temple period, would appear to be using several scriptural passages where divine Wisdom speaks of her role in the creation of the world: at least Prov. 8.22-23, possibly Sir. 24.1-12 and Wis. 7.22-8.1.1 Wisdom, plainly to be seen in the beauty and complexity of the created world, is also inaccessible, far beyond the grasp of human beings, something or someone that human beings must ask God to send to them. The portrayal of divine Wisdom as a female figure, offering her invitation to human beings first occurs in Proverbs as a poetic device, presumably intended to encourage young men to persevere in their Torah study. Because the Hebrew and the Greek words for wisdom (Heb. hokma; Gk. sophia) are both feminine nouns, personified Wisdom can quite naturally be envisaged as the woman of a house

1. E. Wainwright, ‘Which Intertext? A Response to An Ecojustice Challenge: Is Earth Valued in John 1?’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament (Earth Bible 5; ed. N. C. Habel and V. Balabanski; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 83–8.

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inviting people in that they might learn from her (Prov. 8.1-4, 32-36), calling them to come to her banquet (Prov. 9.5). It is clear from the biblical wisdom literature that contemplation of the creation as evidence for the Creator’s wisdom inspired the sages of Israel to think of that wisdom in personal terms. If it was ‘through wisdom’ that God had produced the ‘manifold works’ of creation (Ps. 104.24), then Wisdom could be imagined as a skilled craftswoman working at God’s side as the skies, the land, the seas and the foundations of the earth were established, ‘rejoicing in [God’s] inhabited world and delighting in humankind’ (Prov. 8.27-31). If something of the Creator could be glimpsed through observation of the wisdom so obvious in the way the creation is sustained in being, then Wisdom was surely, as Greek Solomon would put it, ‘a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty’ (Wis. 7.25). So personified Wisdom begins her literary career as a teacher inviting people to learn from her and develops into someone intimately associated with God in the creation of the world, and continually active in the life processes of the Earth, ‘[reaching] mightily from one end of the earth to the other, [ordering] all things well’ (8.1). In later writings she even comes among humankind, making her dwelling in Israel (Sir. 24.8-12). In Greek Solomon’s rewriting of 1 Kgs 3.5-14 we find the young king praying that a female personified Wisdom will come down to Earth from the heavenly throne to work beside him (Wis. 9.10). Clearly the Johannine hymnist belongs to a group of believers who see in the arrival of Jesus the definitive entry of this Wisdom figure into the world. So the hymn quoted as an overture to the Johannine portrayal of Jesus tells of heavenly Wisdom in such a way that the audience will see the similarities between the story of her involvement in the world and the story of Jesus. However, even though the poem follows the outline of the story that would be familiar to anyone schooled in the Jewish tradition of wisdom speculation, the word ‘wisdom’ never actually appears in it. Instead the protagonist of the poem is ‘the Word’. Here we have to take account of the artist’s familiarity with the Scriptures and in particular with the biblical poets’ characteristic use of the technique of parallelism that enables them to nuance a statement further by repeating it in a reworded form. Readers of the Greek Scriptures would have encountered the concepts of understanding (Gk, synesis), insight (Gk, phronēsis) and knowledge (Gk, epistēmē) cropping up frequently in parallel with the concept of wisdom (e.g. Prov. 3.13, 19; 7.4; 24.3; Job 28.12; Jer. 10.12; 51.15). Ideas about God’s wisdom, insight, knowledge and understanding all convey human apprehensions of what we might call the mind of God, God’s way of thinking, God’s designs, a concept given a salutarily apophatic definition in Isa. 55.8-9. In some passages the divine word – and also the divine breath that is the bearer of the word – exercises a role associated with divine Wisdom. According to one of the psalmists, for example, By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath (Gk, pneuma, spirit) of his mouth. (Ps. 33.6)

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Similarly, Greek Solomon’s prayer begins, ‘O God … who have made all things by your word, and by your wisdom have formed humankind’ (Wis. 9.1-2). For the Johannine hymnist, the equivalence between divine word and divine wisdom enables the hymn to tell of the personified Word (Logos: a masculine noun in Greek) in terms redolent of personified Wisdom (Sophia: a feminine noun in Greek). So while the prologue’s opening words, ‘In the beginning’ do allude to Genesis, and while the idea of the creating Logos recalls the tenfold repetition of ‘God said’ in the first creation narrative, there is also a strong allusion to Wisdom’s assertion in Prov. 8.23, ‘Before the age (LXX pro tou aiōnos) he established me at the beginning’ (LXX en archē). By means of a complex web of allusion and echo, therefore, the prologue suggests that Jesus embodies divine Wisdom continually at work in the world, ‘[holding] all things together’ (Wis. 1.7). As the gospel unfolds, we will find that the image of the Creator evoked in it is somewhat less the ‘Genesis’ God calling Earth into being than the ‘Wisdom’ God continually giving life in an ongoing activity of creation. In fact, the Johannine Jesus seems to resist literalization of the mythic tale of God making the world in six days and resting on the seventh. ‘My Father is still working’, he insists, ‘and I also am working’ (Jn 5.17). The God revealed by the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is very much the ‘hands-on’ creating God (Chapter 7, §5).

2. §2 My word shall accomplish that which I purpose (Isa. 55.11) In Jewish reflection on the Scriptures, the idea had developed that God’s effective word was, in some sense, a personal agent of God. For example, a prophet might say, ‘The word of the Lord came to me saying …’ (Jer. 1.4; Ezek. 22.1) rather than declare more directly, ‘The Lord said to me …’ To introduce ‘the word of the Lord’, as an intermediary agent, put a reverential ‘buffer’ between the human and the divine. In Gen. 15.1 God’s word comes in a vision to Abram. In Isa. 55.10-11, God’s word is a dynamic protagonist, as effective in coming down from heaven to accomplish God’s purpose, as the rain and snow that come down to water the earth. In the psalms God’s word is sent out to perform God’s bidding: healing the sick (Ps. 107.20) or in springtime turning ice and snow into flowing water (Ps. 147.18). Greek Solomon’s retelling of Israel’s history as the story of how people were ‘saved by Wisdom’ (Wis. 9.18) is particularly instructive. When the account reaches the night of the Exodus, instead of Wisdom who has been the leading actor at every turn, it is God’s ‘all-powerful word’ that leaps down from heaven to Earth to intervene in Israel’s favour (18.15). Finally, there is the use of ‘the word’ (Aram. Memra) as both a reverential circumlocution for God and as an active agent of God that was a regular feature of the Aramaic translation – frequently more of a paraphrase – of the Scriptures used in synagogues at the time of Jesus, although not written down until some centuries later. For example, in the Targum Neofiti version of Gen. 3.8, Adam and Eve hear ‘the sound of the Memra of the

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Lord walking within the garden’.2 In another Targum known as ‘The Four Nights’, preserved only in fragmentary form, the Memra is the agent through which light is created.3 All of this prepared the ground for the Evangelist to speak of a personified divine Word in the Prologue without in any way compromising Jewish monotheism. Logos means word, speech, communication, but it would also have suggested rationality, a sense that has given us our English word ‘logic’ and that is part of the word, ‘ecology’, discourse about the orders, patterns and connections within our oikos, the house(hold) that is our Earth home. For the Evangelist, Logos would have evoked all the biblical equivalents of Wisdom, mentioned above: God’s understanding, insight, knowledge, God’s way of thinking, God’s designs. An educated Jew, reading the Scriptures in Greek, would certainly have been familiar with the personalized biblical usage of Logos as an active agent of the creating and saving God. In the Hellenized cultural environment in which the gospel was written, a Jewish theologian would also have picked up popular Stoic ideas about the role of a logos principle in the origins of the world. The writings of the Jewish philosopher and commentator on the Scriptures, Philo of Alexandria, a near contemporary of the Fourth Evangelist, show how successfully Jewish scholars were able to integrate Greek philosophical concepts with their biblical learning. For Philo the Logos was God’s ‘mind’, in the sense of God’s intentions or plan for the creation, and thus the rational system that held all things together (Creation, 16-20.34). Within this system everything had its own logos, its capacity to exist and function. It has been suggested that the utter desolation described in Isaiah 24, if read as the antithesis of what the Creator intends for Earth, might help us understand what is intended by the term Logos. Thus Logos ‘refers to God’s providential plan for the world’4 and, as we have seen, this is a meaning carried by the biblical terms ‘wisdom’, ‘word’ or ‘thoughts’. We will discover that the concept of ‘the way’ in the wisdom literature is yet another iteration of the same principle (Chapter 13, §7). As we today are learning, interference with the intricate and delicately balanced order in the creation takes a huge ecological toll.

2. §3 Before the world existed (Jn 17.5) For an audience familiar with the Greek Scriptures, the first two words of the gospel, ‘In the beginning’ (en archē), would certainly recall the beginning of the Bible, or

2. M. McNamara (trans.), Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible 1B; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), p. 60. 3. D. Boyarin, ‘The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John’, in HTR 94 (2001), pp. 243–84. 4. J. Ashton, ‘Riddles and Mysteries: The Way, the Truth and the Life’, in Jesus in Johannine Tradition (ed. R. T. Fortna and T. Thatcher; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 333–42 (340).

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more precisely, the opening words of the Torah. The intended audience would not have made the distinctions that we can make today between the two different narratives of creation in Gen. 1.1-2.3 and 2.4-3.24. For them ‘In the beginning’ would have evoked the whole primary history, the story ‘from the foundations of the earth’ (Isa. 40.21; Jn 17.24) right up to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden. Thus ‘the beginning’ covers various incidents from the first three chapters of Genesis. It is the time when a grain of evil seed was sown in Adam’s heart (4 Ezra 4.30). It was at ‘the beginning of creation’ that God made woman from man’s rib (Mk 10.6). The serpent, identified as the devil (an identification first found in Wis. 2.24) ‘was a murderer from the beginning’ (Jn 8.44; 1 Jn 3.8, alluding to Gen. 3.1-7). The Johannine story of Jesus opens, therefore, with an invitation to the audience to view him against the background of the whole story of the creation’s origins. God speaks and a beautiful grove of trees flourishes; humankind is set in this garden ‘to till it’ (Heb., abad: serve, show reverence to) ‘and keep it’ (Heb., shamar: tend, preserve; Gen. 2.15).5 They fail and are expelled from the garden, but they never give up hoping that the way back to it will be opened for them. Obviously the poet’s ‘In the beginning’ invites the audience to stretch their imaginations in temporal terms. We are to envisage a beginning that starts in an era before the world as we know it came into existence, a timeless time that corresponds to ‘Day One’ (Gen. 1.5; NRSV, ‘one day’) in the first Genesis creation story, the aeon before the present age, the pre-creation era of which Wisdom speaks in Prov. 8.23. We are also invited to stretch our imagination in spatial terms. We are to picture a non-material sphere where God dwells, somewhere other than our world. Yet even as we try to do this, we are in the realm of analogy, dealing with faltering attempts of human authors to express the inexpressible, using the best means they have at their disposal: story, poetry, myth. In Jewish thought, the pre-creation era hinted at in Genesis and Proverbs is seen as a state of unity from which all the creation issued. As Alon Goshen-Gottstein explains, The biblical narrative’s odd way of counting the days of the creation: ‘One’, ‘second’, ‘third’, and so on, highlights the distinction between unified reality, to which the idea of number does not apply, and created reality, which brings numeration and multiplicity in its wake.6

This ancient insight into Earth’s origins resonates with our contemporary scientific knowledge that it was from a unity in the form of about one-millionth of a gram of matter that the universe flared forth some fifteen billion years ago. It is in this mysterious setting, the Evangelist tells us, that the Word existed, was with God and

5. N. Habel, The Birth, The Curse and the Greening of Earth: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1-11 (EBC 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), p. 52. 6. A. Goshen-Gottstein, ‘Creation’, in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefs (ed. A. A. Cohen and P. Mends-Flohr; New York: The Free Press, 1988), pp. 113–18 (114).

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was God. In naming God, we refer to what Yvonne Gebara calls ‘the surpassing reality that is the sustaining source of all life and movement’, whose Name we take in vain if we think we are using anything other than metaphor and analogy.7 Moreover, this Word was to be integral and essential to the process whereby the world would come into being. ‘All things came into being through [the Word], and without [the Word] not one thing came into being’ (Jn 1.3). In the Scriptures the expression ‘all things’ (Gk, (ta) panta) conventionally means ‘the created world’. However, the verb used three times in this sentence (Gk: ginomai, become, be, happen) allows for the translation, ‘Everything happened through [the Logos].’ This reading permits the inclusion of God’s involvement in all that happened in Israel’s history, as well as God’s role as Creator.

2. §4 The light shines in the darkness (Jn 1.5) The hymn continues with the statement that in the Logos was life and that this life was the light of humans. Behind this is, no doubt, the first word that God speaks in the Scriptures, ‘Let there be light’ (Gen. 1.3). The hymnist is also describing the Logos in terms associated with Wisdom whose way is ‘light’ and ‘a way of life’ (Prov. 6.23), who is ‘life’ and ‘light for the eyes’ (Bar. 3.14). In the hymn, the Logos is a life-imparting light that, depending on how one translates an immensely difficult phrase, either the darkness has not overcome or the darkness has not grasped or comprehended. Our difficulty in understanding this phrase is compounded by a much debated question. How much of this poem is about divine Wisdom, or its masculine counterpart, the divine Logos? How much of it is about the Word made flesh? In other words, when precisely does the poem begin to speak about Jesus? Some say, not until verse 14, at the statement, ‘The Word was made flesh.’ Others think that the hymn begins to talk about Jesus at verse 9 (or even, some suggest, at verse 5), telling about his coming as light into the world, being welcomed by some, rejected by others, but enabling those receptive to him to become children of God.8 Yet, a counterargument insists that this is exactly Wisdom’s story and it would have made perfect sense in the Diaspora Jewish circle where the gospel was written. The story tells how Wisdom, through whom the world was made, continued over the centuries to shine her light in the world, unrecognized by many – even of God’s own chosen people – but welcomed and understood by a receptive few. So how are we to read this hymn? The solution lies, we would suggest, in the similarities that the Jewish Christian poet has obviously seen between the mission of Wisdom

7. Y. Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress 1999), p. 116. 8. F. J. Moloney, The Gospel of John (Sacra Pagina Series; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), p. 34; J. Ashton, ‘The Transformation of Wisdom: A Study of the Prologue of John’s Gospel’, in NTS 32 (1986), pp. 161–86 (178); Studying John: Approaches to the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 5–35.

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and the mission of Jesus. Some would argue that this encourages us to read the prologue both ways, not as two alternative readings, but as two mutually enriching readings that can be brought into conversation with each other.9 From our ecological perspective, it may be more fruitful to read verse 14 – ‘The word became flesh’ – as the point where the Jesus-believing poet diverges from a purely Jewish understanding of the Logos.10 The hymn would then speak in verse 9 of the divine Word as a light that persisted in shining. The imperfect tense of the verb in this sentence conveys the sense of ongoing action. The true light of the Logos kept on shining, even though the world – made through the Logos and therefore belonging to the Logos (Gk, idia: one’s own) – did not grasp or comprehend it. The light was there for all people, but only a few of the Logos’ own (Gk, idioi) welcomed it and thereby became the children of God. The Jewish background to this becomes clearer if we remember that, for a biblically literate Jewish audience, Word and Wisdom would have been two ways of talking about the same reality, two terms used metaphorically to convey God’s activity in the creating and sustaining of the world. A passage in 1 Enoch – a second to first century BCE pseudepigraphical composition regarded as scriptural in the Evangelist’s time – provides a helpful background to this extremely complex Johannine passage, even if we do have to consider the possibility of Christian interference in the transmission of this work. Wisdom could not find a place in which she could dwell; but a place was found (for her) in the heavens. Then Wisdom went out to dwell with the children of the people, but she found no resting place. (So) Wisdom returned to her place And she settled permanently among the angels. (1 En. 42.1-2)11

In the wider context of 1 Enoch, it is the heavenly beings in revolt against God that reveal a spurious wisdom to humans. The true Wisdom stays with God, an idea not unlike Ben Sira’s assertion that all wisdom comes from God and is with God forever (Sir. 1.1). In contrast to 1 Enoch, where Wisdom wanders through the Earth in vain, Ben Sira tells of Wisdom’s successful quest to find a home among humankind. Identifying herself as a creative word or breath coming from the mouth of the Most High – thus in terms associated with the Logos (Sir. 24.3) – Wisdom recounts her search all over the Earth for somewhere to pitch her tent and of ‘the Creator of all things’ telling her to make her dwelling in Jacob (24.6-8). In Ben Sira’s view, Israel is privileged among all other nations, in being receptive to Wisdom. As we will soon see though (§8 below), he, or a subsequent editor of his work, will go on to press the myth of Wisdom’s quest into a celebration of the Law of Moses.

9. Ashton, ‘The Transformation of Wisdom’, p. 179. 10. Boyarin, ‘The Gospel of the Memra’, p. 257. 11. OTP I, pp. 5–89 (33).

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One of the reasons why some interpreters think that verses 9 to 13 must be about the coming of the Logos into the world in Jesus is the statement about those receptive to the light becoming children of God. There may well be a tendency here to regard the status of children of God as a Christian preserve, thereby forgetting that to be God’s child or son is Israel’s calling (Exod. 4.23; Hos. 11.1). We must not overlook the fact that the Jewish people depicted in the Fourth Gospel certainly saw themselves as children of God (Jn 11.52). ‘We have one father, even God,’ they insist (8.41 RSV). Formed by the writings of their sages, they knew that to be open to wisdom is to be God’s child (Wis. 2.13, 16, 18; 5.5). As the Johannine Jesus explains later in the gospel, to be God’s child means to do what one sees one’s Father doing (Jn 5.19). The semitism ‘to be a son of ’, meaning ‘to be like’ – obviously based on the recognition of family resemblances – would also be part of the mix here (Mt. 5.9; 23.31). A saying of the Matthean Jesus comes straight out of this Israelite insistence that Wisdom makes people children of God. To observe God’s wisdom at work in the indiscriminate shining of the sun and descent of the rain on everyone, whether deserving or not, and to learn from that to be loving to all, is to be children of God; to resemble God (Mt. 5.43-45).

2. §5 All things came into being through him (Jn 1.3) From the idea that all things were created through the Logos it follows that everything in the creation was intended by God to be a revelation, a communication, a logos with a small ‘l’, so to speak, a word from God for human beings to hear, heed and reflect upon, thereby learning something about its Source. If we read verse 3 as also saying that everything happened through the Logos, then we have a view of Israel’s history as a revelation of God as Saviour. Both readings are valid and important, but we will focus on creation here in keeping with our eco-hermeneutical concerns. In The Book of Wisdom, Greek Solomon bewails the ignorance of human beings who should have been able to learn ‘from the greatness and beauty of created things a corresponding perception of their Creator’ (Wis. 13.5). Paul, another Hellenized Jew, shares this understanding of the more-than-human world. He believes that ever since the creation of the world it has been possible to perceive something of God through the things that God has made (Rom.1.19-20). The sayings and parables of Jesus, based on keen observation of nature, place him in direct continuity with his predecessor sages who taught that, because everything in creation has been made by God’s word and formed by God’s wisdom (Prov. 3.19; 8.30; Wis. 9.1-2), even an ant can teach (Prov. 6.6-11; 30.25). In this Jewish worldview, inherited by Christianity, all created things are theophanies to elicit awe and praise, not mere commodities to be exploited or manipulated. If we listen to verses 9 to 13 of the prologue with all of this in mind, then it tells of all the beauty, intricacy and majesty of the world through which the Logos was speaking, through which Wisdom was calling out, stretching out her hands to humankind. Those who despised her (Wis. 3.11) preferred to exploit the creation, to indulge themselves, to go by their ‘might is right’ principle

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(2.6-11) and to worship things rather than letting them point to their Maker. Humankind’s rejection of Wisdom had an impact on the Earth: people brought on destruction by the work of their hands (1.12) and ended up having to lament their refusal to grasp/comprehend the shining of Wisdom’s light (5.6). In this way of interpreting the Johannine hymn, therefore, un-grasped, uncomprehended light refers to Wisdom’s unheeded call (Prov. 1.24). Commenting on these verses that tell of the centuries-long attempts of the life-giving light of Wisdom/Logos to keep shining in the world and to get through to humanity, John Ashton speaks of ‘a continuous illumination that finally flames out in the incarnation of the Logos’.12

2. §6 The word pitched a tent among us (Jn 1.14) In the reading that we are adopting, we find in verse 14 an explicit statement of how eventually the quest of Wisdom to find a dwelling on Earth was fulfilled when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the moment when the hymn identifies Jesus with divine Wisdom. God’s word, thoughts, designs, at work in the creation and in Israel’s history are now to be seen to be visibly at work in Jesus. From our ecological perspective there are several things to note here. The Evangelist does not say that the Logos became a man. ‘The Word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. In the Scriptures, the word ‘flesh’ (Heb., basar; Gk, sarx) frequently occurs in the expression ‘all flesh’. In some cases it probably means ‘all people’ (e.g. Isa. 40.5-6). In others whether it encompasses ‘all living creatures’ is a moot point (e.g. Ps. 145.21; see ‘every living thing’ in v. 16). There are passages, however, where ‘all flesh’ simply has to be understood as inclusive of the other-than-human (e.g. Gen. 6.13; Job 34.14-15, especially if Job alludes to Ps. 104.29). This biblical understanding of sarx may well urge us, in an eco-hermeneutical reading, to read the ‘us’ among whom the Word pitched his tent as the whole Earth community and not just human beings. ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity’ and, as we are learning from the geneticists and biologists, we are not a solo species; we are related to all other ‘flesh’ with whom we share the same remote origin in the dust of exploding stars. The verb ‘dwelt’ (Gk, eskēnōsen: pitched a tent), recalling Wisdom’s pitching of her tent (Gk, skēnōma, tent; Sir. 24.8) is also important for our Earth-conscious reading. It has been asked whether this prologue perhaps ‘devalues Earth’ by intimating that ‘flesh is but the temporary – and dispensable – abode of the Word passing through from “above” to “below” and back to “above” again’.13 This is more likely to be the case if one thinks the whole hymn delineates the career of the

12. J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 209. 13. N. C. Habel, ‘An Eco-justice Challenge: Is Earth Valued in John 1?’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament, pp. 76–82 (81–2).

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incarnate Word. One might suggest in reply that the tent-pitching imagery makes the point that the Word is actually sharing in the common experience of all life on Earth: that death is inevitable. King Hezekiah, facing the prospect of an untimely death through illness, complained: ‘My dwelling is plucked up and removed from me like a shepherd’s tent’ (Isa. 38.12). Perhaps this influenced Paul’s reference to human experience as life in a tent (2 Cor. 5.1, 4). Maybe, then, the verb eskēnōsen emphasizes the condition of the Word made flesh as an earthling, camping in a temporary and insubstantial dwelling and sharing the ultimate fate of every living creature.

2. §7 The glory as of a father’s only son (Jn 1.14) In Jesus, as the Evangelist testifies, the glory of God has somehow become visible. To speak of the divine glory is to use another of those biblical images that attempt falteringly to convey a sense of God’s self-disclosure to human beings while still preserving a profound reverence for the unknowable divine transcendence. We have already encountered Wisdom and Word. Now the Evangelist speaks of God’s glory, explaining later on that while no one has ever actually seen God, Jesus has made God known (Jn 1.18). Here the Evangelist maintains continuity with the biblical writers’ reticence about claiming direct experience of the transcendent. Isaiah’s experience of a theophany, for example, is fraught with danger (Isa. 6.5) because no one can actually see God and survive the experience (Exod. 33.20). So in the Scriptures people tend to see only a manifestation of the Divine that is bearable for human beings, such as the divine glory (Exod. 16.10; 1 Kgs 8.11). Sometimes God’s spirit (e.g. Isa. 40.13; 61.1) or God’s angel (Exod. 3.2) exercises a similar literary function. For the Evangelist, it is as ‘the only Son from the Father’ that Jesus manifests the glory of God or God’s identity as the One characterized by ‘grace and truth’ – attributes that the Greek Bible’s readers would immediately recognize as the core definition of Israel’s God: a God of steadfast love and faithfulness (Exod. 34.6; Ps. 25.10; 86.15). The attribution of the royal title Son of God to Jesus (occurring nine times in the Fourth Gospel) arose in the early Jesus movement out of the believers’ conviction that Jesus was the answer to the hope bound up with the memory of King David. The title Son of God entered early Christian discourse, therefore, as a royal title (2 Sam. 7.14; Ps. 2.7; 89.26-27). As the movement spread in the Greco-Roman world where it was commonplace for emperors to claim divine sonship, the title would be somewhat differently understood. But even within the ambit of Judaism, the title Son of God would take on further shades of meaning that would widen its appeal to include people whose expectation for the restoration of Israel did not necessarily take the form of the Davidic hope. This seems to have been the case in the Johannine strand of the early Jesus movement which, as the gospel indicates, included Samaritans (Jn 4.28-30) and members of priestly circles (18.15), including perhaps Sadducees, whose hope for ‘the one who was to come’ was not shaped by the

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Davidic dynasty tradition. An important task in our eco-hermeneutical reading of the Fourth Gospel will be to peel away the encrustations of later theology in an attempt to discern what the title Son of God might have meant to the gospel’s first audience (Chapter 7, §3–§4). At this stage of our reading we might simply note that the root metaphor operating in this title is, of course, human procreation which in the ancient world was regarded as a male feat (1.13) with the woman taking a passive role. A father was thus someone who  bestowed life. As we progress through the gospel we will find that the title ‘the Son’ is strongly linked with the idea that a father teaches his son his trade or craft so that the son can then ensure the continuation of his father’s work (5.19-20; Chapter 7, §4). This nuance of the title ‘Son of God’ resonates well with our ecological perspective. God’s work is the creating and sustaining of the world, in other words, the bestowal of life. This is the work that the Father has given Jesus to do and that Jesus, in turn, will require of his disciples.

2. §8 Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (Jn 1.17) The prologue concludes in verses 16 to 18 with a comparison between the fullness of grace and truth from which the believing audience have received and the gift of the Law through Moses. To appreciate this, we need to unpack the term Law. We mentioned above that en archē recalled the opening words of the Torah. Law, therefore, suggests far more than the legal prescriptions of the Mosaic Law. It includes the knowledge that Moses needed in order to become, in later traditions, the honorary author of the Pentateuch. From our ecological perspective, it is important to note that Moses’ supposed knowledge would have included an understanding of the origins of the world, of God’s purposes in creating it, and of how the structure and proportions of the cosmos were to be reflected in the design of the tabernacle. In the Judaism contemporary with the early Jesus movement, Moses was believed to have received all of this esoteric knowledge from God during his forty days and nights on Mount Sinai. The Law was not just a written document, however. It was a way of life. This lofty view of the Law had developed in the post-exilic era. For the leaders of communities struggling under the onslaughts of Greek and then Roman rule, urging the people to keep the Law seemed to be a surer way to safeguard Jewish identity than encouraging the search for a nebulous and ultimately inaccessible Wisdom. So we find in the writings from this period a reworked Moses telling the Israelites, ‘Keep [the statutes and ordinances of the Law] and do them; for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people”’ (Deut. 4.6). Similarly a psalmist who keeps the Law can claim to have more wisdom than his teachers or elders (Ps. 119.99-100). In a second century BCE pseudepigraphical text purporting to be an exilic work by Jeremiah’s secretary Baruch, a long poem invites Israel to ‘hear the commandments of life and learn wisdom’ (Bar. 3.9). The poem tells of Wisdom, inaccessible and known

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only to God, yet imparted to Israel. Her eventual appearance on Earth to live among humankind (3.37) is pinpointed to the giving of the Law to Moses on Sinai. She (Wisdom) is the book of the commandments of God, and the law that endures for ever. All who hold her fast will live, and those who forsake her will die. Turn, O Jacob, and take her; walk toward the shining of her light. Do not give your glory to another, or your advantages to an alien people. Happy are we, O Israel, for we know what is pleasing to God.

Another passage where the Law takes on the attributes of Wisdom is the (possibly secondary) continuation of Ben Sira’s account of Wisdom coming to dwell among humankind (See §4 above). Here a Jewish sage living in Alexandria draws on his experience of Egyptian orchard-paradises and their irrigation systems. Ben Sira identifies ‘the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law which Moses commanded us’ with personified Wisdom (Sir. 24.23-34), his description of her in terms of trees prized for their fragrance and beauty (24.13-16) recalling the primeval garden. This leads him into an Edenic rhapsody about the written Law: how it fills people with wisdom like the four rivers of Paradise and flows into the Earth ‘like a water channel into a garden’ (24.23-31. See Gen. 2.10-14). For Ben Sira, Adam’s problem was that he did not know Wisdom-as-the-Law perfectly (Sir. 24.28). The implication is clear: to live according to the Law – in kindness, almsgiving and fear of God (40.17, 27) – is to regain paradise. The high regard in which the Law is held in writings such as these makes the prologue’s contrast between Moses and Jesus (Jn 1.17) all the more striking. The Evangelist’s estimate of these two figures may be seen in a telling allusion to the Wisdom of Ben Sira later in the gospel. While Wisdom identified with the Law promises, ‘Those who eat me will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more’ (Sir. 24.21), speaking in Jesus she goes much further: ‘The one who comes to me will not hunger, and the one who believes in me will never thirst’ (Jn 6.35). From indications in the gospel, we know that the Evangelist’s intended audience included Jews who were being deprived of their sense of religious belonging if they declared their faith in Jesus (9.22; 12.42; 16.2). By resisting that identification of Wisdom with the Law that somehow tones her down and diminishes her mystery, the gospel reassures its audience that, while they can find Wisdom in the Mosaic Law, she is not coextensive with it. The revelation of God – grace and truth – is fully theirs in Jesus, Wisdom, the Word made flesh. So the Logos is much more than a masculine surrogate for Wisdom. It is a challenge to emerging rabbinic Judaism’s claim that all revelation and salvation is to be found in the Torah.

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2. §9 With God … in the bosom of the Father (Jn 1.1, 18) There is another aspect to Jesus’ status as Son of God: his closeness to his Father. Twice in the prologue the Word become flesh is referred to as God’s ‘only son’ (Jn 1.14, 18). The Septuagintal word monogenes translates the Hebrew word yahid which conveys the special status of a son who is not necessarily an only child, or may not even be the actual firstborn son in a family, but who is especially beloved and has all the entitlements that ancient Near Eastern patriarchal cultures conferred on a man’s first male child. An approximate contemporary English equivalent might be the term of endearment, ‘one and only’. In Jn 1.14 the monogenes is ‘from the Father’, in the sense that he is sent into the world by the Father. In 1.18 he is ‘in the bosom of the Father’. The Greek preposition eis, used here, actually means ‘into’ and some English versions try to capture its relational dynamic with less literal translations such as ‘nearest to the Father’s heart’ (NEB), or ‘close to the Father’s heart’ (NJB). Again it is helpful to identify the underlying metaphor. Later in the gospel, the beloved disciple will appear reclining at table ‘in the bosom of Jesus’ (13.23). This is in keeping with Greco-Roman dining customs, probably in the author’s world, rather than the world of the narrative. Diners conventionally reclined three to a couch, propping themselves up on their left elbow and reaching for the communal food dishes with their right hand. The diner on Jesus’ right could thus quite easily lean back against his chest (13.25). The similarity of the prologue’s wording to that in 13.23 would seem to be part of a pattern that recurs throughout the gospel: what Jesus is to God, the disciple is to Jesus. The commission of the risen Jesus, ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (20.21), is perhaps the clearest iteration of the pattern. If the Son in the bosom of the Father and the disciple in the bosom of Jesus are similarly linked, then the metaphor underlying the Evangelist’s description of the Son who leans into the Father’s bosom has to be table fellowship.14 In the Evangelist’s time, the heavenly realm where God dwells was frequently imagined in terms of a banquet (Isa. 25.6-8; 65.13-14; Rev. 3.20; 19.9). Even the well-known expression ‘in the bosom of Abraham’ (Lk. 16.23) refers to the Jewish belief that the resurrected righteous would recline at table there with the patriarchs. Once Christians no longer reclined for their community meals, they lost the point of the banquet metaphor. When the gospel was written, however, reclining at table for the regular community meal on the first day of the week would have been the primary form of association for its first audience. As we make our way through the gospel, we will find that eating and drinking feature prominently in it. Here, as the prologue leads us into the narrative, we find the Evangelist drawing on meal imagery to express the intimacy of the Son’s relationship with the Father.

14. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, p. 153.

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2. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) To attempt to view the gospel’s prologue from an Earth-conscious perspective is to share in the work to be done by all the world’s religions: ‘a process of retrieval of texts and traditions, critical reevaluation, and reconstruction for present circumstances’.15 To ask then how we might carry out God’s work in the world is to face up to quite a challenge. As Kathleen Rushton puts it, ‘Can the cosmological horizon of the prologue and that of a present-day reader informed by twentyfirst-century cosmologies and evolutionary biology meet in order to inspire a transforming spirituality and ethical action in this ecological age?’16 Some tentative suggestions follow. We are part of the creation that exists because God speaks. We are created through the Word. Our very existence is the proof that everything is gift. Our sustaining Earth home is nothing else but gift, ‘grace upon grace’ (Jn 1.16 NEB). Each of our fellow creatures is a word from the Word inviting us to be ‘all ears’ for an insight into the One whose self-expression it is. ‘Such attentive listening may well be the only way for us to begin rekindling a deeper sense of relationship with the places we inhabit. It may also be necessary to the long-term survival of those places.’17 It should be clear from the way we treat the Earth that we reverence it as God’s ‘speech’, availing of its bounty in a way that is full of respect for both Giver and gift, and awareness that the gift is for sharing. Thomas Aquinas wrote, ‘They are wrong who say: the idea that one has of creatures is not important for faith, provided one thinks correctly about God. An error about creatures results in a false idea of God.’18 That is why polluted or exhausted rivers are a travesty of what God intends to say through the gift of flowing water, why degraded soil is a misrepresentation of the Creator’s care for the Earth, and why tainted air is a perversion of Wisdom’s provision for ‘everything that breathes’ (Ps. 150.6). The recognition that the ecological crisis calls for far more than scientific or technological responses was powerfully articulated in 1990 in the document Preserving the Earth: An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion that issued from a global environmental forum held in Moscow. We understand that what is regarded as sacred is more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so regarded. Efforts to

15. M. E. Tucker, ‘Preface’ to Ecology and the Environment, ed. D. K. Swearer, pp 1–7 (6). 16. K. P. Rushton, ‘The Cosmology of John 1:1-14 and Its Implications for Ethical Action in This Ecological Age’, Colloquium 45, 2 (2013), pp. 137–53 (153). 17. D. Burton-Christie, ‘Words beneath the Water: Logos, Cosmos, and the Spirit of Place’, in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans (ed. D. T. Hessel and R. Radford Reuther; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 317–36 (336). 18. Summa Contra Gentiles 1, 2, c.3. Cited by Boff in Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. 189.

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safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred.19

Thinking of the divine Logos as God’s ‘dream’ for the creation, as contrasted with the ‘nightmare scenario’ that we are now imposing on it, we acknowledge our need for more than technological solutions. We need wisdom far beyond what we have demonstrated until now. For believers in Jesus, the surest way forward is to align our ways of thinking and acting with God’s Wisdom, because she reveals the sustaining source of all life, ‘reaching mightily from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things well’ (Wis. 8.1). In fact, Ellen F. Davis would go so far as to recommend ‘the forthright embrace of ignorance’. This ignorance qualifies us to be guests at Wisdom’s banquet (Prov. 9.4-5). We must allow our imagination and action to be restrained and guided by the way the world itself works, instead of relying on our own limited understanding (Prov. 3.5-7).20 Thus reverence for the intricacy and delicacy of the Creation and great hesitancy in imposing our demands on it is a contemporary expression of the ‘fear of God’ that is ‘the beginning of wisdom’ (Prov. 1.7). When we ask at the end of each chapter, ‘What must we do?’ the suggested answers will be no more than simple variations on this theme that could of course be developed endlessly in creative ways as diverse as the biosphere itself. Finally, the Evangelist’s recourse to meal imagery to convey the intimacy of the Son’s relationship with the Father taps into something profound about our human experience. We need to eat in order to live; the best way to eat is as companions, as people who share bread with each other (Lat. com: with; panis: bread). To eat mindfully is to experience God’s gift of sustenance coming to us through plants and animals that die to become our food. To borrow again from Norman Wirzba, Eating demonstrates that we cannot live alone. Growing food reminds us that we do not create life. Food connects us to the membership of creation and to God. Thoughtful eating reminds us that there is no human fellowship without a table, no table without a kitchen, no kitchen without a garden, no garden without viable ecosystems, no ecosystems without the forces productive of life, and no life without its source in God.21

19. Cited by M. E. Tucker in ‘Religion and Ecology: Survey of the Field’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology (ed. R. S. Gottlieb; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 398–418 (403). 20. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, p. 33. 21. Wirzba, Food and Faith, p. 34.

Chapter 3 F ROM L AMP L IGHT TO D AWN

The first two scenes in the gospel narrative centre on John. The prologue also contains two references to him (Jn 1.6-8, 15) that would seem, going by the jarring shifts to and fro between poetry and fairly plain prose, to be redactional additions. We will include them in our discussion of John in this chapter, as well as two further passages: 3.25-30 and 5.33-35, where he figures.

3. §1 He came as a witness (Jn 1.7) The first insertion in the prologue has already introduced ‘a man sent from God whose name was John [who] came as a witness to testify to the light’ (Jn 1.6-7). The gospel narrative opens on a similarly forensic note with, ‘This is the testimony given by John’ (Gk, martyria: testimony, evidence given by a witness in a law court). John’s role as a witness is the main preoccupation here. It is almost incidentally that we discover well into the scene that he has been baptizing people (1.24-25, 28) and, in contrast to the synoptics, the Fourth Gospel never refers to him as ‘John the Baptist’. Neither does it tell of him baptizing Jesus. It appears that ‘the Judeans’ (Jn 1.19) or, as we subsequently gather, some prominent Judean Pharisees (1.24) have asked members of the priestly families connected with the temple in Jerusalem to go to ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’ (1.28) and investigate. This would be more plausible if scribes, rather than Pharisees, had asked. The Jerusalem scribes were connected with the temple whereas pharisaism was a lay movement, even if it did include some scribes among its adherents. The unlikely alliance of Pharisees with priests and Levites in this scene reveals an Evangelist writing at some remove from actual events. Whatever their precise provenance, John’s interrogators are knowledgeable members of the religious and political elite. These emissaries set about their enquiries. ‘Who are you? Are you the Messiah? Are you Elijah? Are you the prophet?’ Each of these three proposed identifications for John represents a biblical expression of hope for the restoration of Israel that appealed to a particular group of people. Some expected a new king in the line of David (Aram., Messiah; Gk, Christos: anointed one) who would usher in a golden era of restoration, but even within this category of expectation there was a range of opinion. Some envisaged a military Messiah who would lead a rising

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against the Romans; some, a peaceful Messiah who would be a man of prayer and a wise interpreter of the Law. Some preferred to think in terms of an anointed priest. Others looked forward to what they called ‘the day of the Lord’, the inauguration of a new era when God’s reign of justice would be definitively established. They remembered the prophecy: ‘Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes’ (Mal. 4.5) and wondered if John might be Elijah come again. Others remembered Moses’ promise that God would send another prophet like himself (Deut. 18.18), so they wondered if John might be that prophet. John refuses all three of these designations, but as the gospel unfolds, we find that Jesus is actually the one that they all fit. In this way, the Fourth Evangelist assures the audience that whatever form their longing for restoration took – whether they were looking for a Messiah, an Elijah-like herald of ‘the day of the Lord’, or a Prophet-like-Moses through whom God would speak to them again – their longing is fulfilled in the coming of Jesus.

3. §2 In the wilderness (Jn 1.23) Having refused all three identifications, John identifies himself as ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord,” as the prophet Isaiah said’. In the Hebrew Scriptures it is the way – a highway to be built for a grandiose Babylonian-style triumphal procession of Israel’s God – that is in the wilderness, not the voice. In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. (Isa. 40.3)

All four gospels use what seems to be an early Christian reading of this passage, facilitated by the Greek translation and, no doubt, influenced by common knowledge that John’s activities took place in the wilderness. An authorial aside later in the Fourth Gospel – ‘for John had not yet been put in prison’ (Jn 3.24) – would suggest that the audience knew more about John than what the Fourth Gospel actually recounts. The wilderness location of ‘the voice’ is significant for our eco-hermeneutical interest in reading this scene with attention to its geographical setting, ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’ (Jn 1.28). This is not the same place as Bethany near Jerusalem where Martha, Mary and Lazarus lived (12.1). It has proved impossible, however, to pinpoint its location precisely.1 Some scholars cite ancient manuscripts that locate the scene in Betharaba, a wilderness location west of the Jordan, near Jericho. Some suggest that ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’ could perhaps be the region of Batanea; others that it might be in the same area as Aenon near the Samaritan town of Salim, west of the Jordan, where the Evangelist will subsequently tell us

1. R. Riesner, ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’, in ABD I, pp. 703–5.

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John was baptizing (3.23; 10.40). However, John may have baptized at Aenon only during a later phase of his ministry. The meaning of the name Aenon, ‘a place of springs’, has suggested three major spring sites along the west of the Rift Valley as possible locations for John’s activities: Scythopolis/Beth-shan, a spring in the Wadi Farah called Ainun, or a Judean site ten kilometres northeast of Jerusalem in the Wadi Salim.2 In common with Luke, the Fourth Gospel does not actually state that John was baptizing people ‘in the River Jordan’ (as in Mk 1.5 and Mt. 3.6). The Fourth Gospel leaves open the possibility that he chose one of these spring sites ‘because there was much water there’ (Jn 3.23). As always in the Fourth Gospel, there is a symbolic level at which the wilderness setting that the Isaiah quotation sets up can be appreciated. John quotes the sixth century BCE prophet, known to us as Second Isaiah, who assured the exiles in Babylon that their God was about to restore them to their own land in a new Exodus, even more wonderful than the first. In this event, according to Isaiah’s prophecy, the divine glory is to be revealed and ‘all flesh will see it together’ (Isa. 40.5). As we have seen, Isaian images for the return from exile – wilderness transformed into a garden, springs of water flowing in the desert, the reversal of the expulsion from Eden – are taken up in numerous texts from the late Second Temple period that tell of a future restoration of Israel (Chapter 1, §3). This, the Evangelist believes, happened when the divine glory became visible in Jesus (Jn  1.14). Even if it is impossible to get more than a general sense of the actual location, we can assume that a site that featured either a flowing river or natural springs and pools would have been a welcome contrast to the harsh and arid terrain through which people would have had to travel to reach John. As Earth-conscious readers, we might try to imagine the bodily experience of being plunged (Gk, baptizō: immerse, dip, soak) into flowing water, particularly in the hot climate of the land of Israel. The image of John immersing people in refreshing water at an oasis-like place in an otherwise desert area evokes numerous biblical passages where flinty rock becomes a pool (Ps. 114.8), an inhospitable terrain becomes a place of springs (Ps. 84.6). So even in this wilderness where John performs his role as ‘the voice’ there are signs that the making of the desert into God’s garden (Isa. 51.3) is already beginning to happen. This intimation of refreshment and renewal may well be part of the Evangelist’s plan that the overarching plot of the narrative should begin in a wilderness where there are surprising hints of possible transformation, and reach its climax in a place where there is a garden (Jn 19.41).

3. §3 I baptize with water (Jn 1.26) This raises the question of the meaning of John’s baptism. When we look at the phenomenon of immersion rites, not only in the Jewish environment of the time, but also in the wider Greco-Roman context, we find that ritual washing has diverse

2. R. W. Smith, ‘Salim’, in ABD V, p. 905.

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meanings. Purificatory immersion was normally a prerequisite for admission to a temple. The archaeological remains of cultic complexes all over the Mediterranean world show evidence of elaborate water supply systems and fountains. This holds true for the area around the site of the temple in Jerusalem where the remains of numerous pre-70 CE stepped immersion pools (mikvaoth) have been found, many with a Pharisaic invention called an otzar, an ancillary cistern of water that flowed through a pipe into the mikvah to create the effect of the living/running water that the Law required (Lev. 14.50-52; 15.13).3 Ritual washing often had an initiatory function, symbolizing rebirth into a new life as a devotee of a deity or as a member of a community. There is ample evidence for ritual immersion in the archaeological remains at Qumran and in the writings of the ascetics who lived there. In keeping with their view of their community as an alternative spiritual temple, they initiated new members in a ceremony that included ritual washing (1QS III.4-9) and it would seem that they performed frequent ablutions as part of their daily observances. One passage in their Community Rule interprets ritual immersion as a bath in ‘the waters of repentance’ (1QS III.2-9). This is similar to the synoptic understanding that John’s baptism was ‘for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mk 1.4; Lk. 3.3; see Mt. 3.6). However, another Qumran passage, explaining how God refines and purifies an initiate leading him from deceit to truth, draws on a different interpretation. [God] will sprinkle over him the spirit of truth like lustral water (in order to cleanse him) from all the abhorrences of deceit. … In this way the upright will understand knowledge of the Most High and the wisdom of the sons of heaven will teach those of perfect behaviour. For these are those selected by God for an everlasting covenant and to them shall belong all the glory of Adam. (1QS IV.21-23)4

This seems to suggest that immersion rituals restored people to the state of humanity before the expulsion from Eden when Adam and Eve were cultivating the garden in accordance with God’s wisdom, doing the work that God had given them – and, in some retellings of Genesis, had even taught them – to do. This is a state of living aligned with truth, as distinct from one aligned with the deceit that the serpent – who would later be identified with the devil – introduced with his lies (Gen. 3.1-7; Chapter 9, §7). There is evidence in early Christian sources that Jewish Jesus followers continued to practise their traditional ablutions, so there may well be a line of continuity here (Heb. 9.9-10; Justin Dial. 46; Epiphanius

3. S. Freyne, ‘Jewish Immersion and Christian Baptism: Continuity of the Margins?’, in Ablution, Initiation and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity, vol. 1 (ed. D. Hellholm, T. Vegge, Ø. Norderval, C. Hellholm; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 221–53 (232). 4. F. García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English. Second Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 7.

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Pan. 30.16.1; 30.26.1).5 According to Freyne’s survey of the relevant material in the Pseudo-Clementines, immersion ‘restores the baptized to their original status as being like God, and therefore enabled to act like God in doing good works’.6 This brings us very close to the Johannine thought world where Jesus believers continue ‘the works of God’ (Jn 6.28) that the Father sent Jesus to do. In the Fourth Gospel there is no suggestion that John’s baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. Interestingly this concurs with Josephus’ record that John ‘simply bade the Jews to join in baptism provided they were cultivating virtue and practising justice’ (Ant. 18.5.2.). Similarly in the Pseudo-Clementines, the purity expressed by ritual washing ‘follows goodness’ (Hom. 11.28).7 ‘The washing of the body is the sequel of that good’ [sc. the purifying of the mind].8

3. §4 The friend of the bridegroom (Jn 3.29) The image of John as an austere prophet with his hair shirt and his diet of locusts and wild honey, denouncing people as a ‘brood of vipers’ and telling them how richly they deserve ‘the wrath to come’ is from the synoptic gospels (Mk 1.6; Mt. 3.4-12; Lk. 3.7-14). In the Fourth Gospel John is quite a different character. As ‘the friend of the bridegroom’ – a figure somewhat similar to the best man in many contemporary Western cultures – John stands beside Jesus, hears him, and rejoices greatly at the sound of his voice (Jn 3.29). In fact, there is something of the Song of Songs about this joyful Johannine John, the friend of Jesus (Song 5.1; 8.13). More precisely, though, there is a clear reminiscence here of Jeremiah’s promise that ‘the voice of the bridegroom’, one of several sounds that disappeared from the land when Israel was exiled from it (Jer. 7.34; 16.9; 25.10) will be heard again, once Israel is restored (33.10-13).9 Jeremiah’s vision of this restoration is wonderfully inclusive of the more-than-human inhabitants of the land. To notice this is to experience how attention to the Evangelist’s scriptural sources can contribute to an Earthconscious reading of the gospel by raising the covert voice of Earth to audibility. In this Johannine echo of Jeremiah we encounter one of several indications in the gospel that when the Logos/Sophia becomes part of the Earth community in the person of Jesus, it is a wedding. As a traditional English carol, Tomorrow Will Be My Dancing Day, that shows strong affinities with the Fourth Gospel, has Jesus declare: ‘I have come to call my true love to my dance.’ The carol sings of the Lover who takes fleshly substance and is knit to human nature, but with our ecological

5. Freyne, ‘Jewish Immersion’, pp. 221–4. 6. Ibid., p. 224. 7. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (trans.), Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. XVII (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1870), p. 187. 8. Roberts and Donaldson (trans.), Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. VIII, p. 155. 9. J. McWhirter, The Bridegroom Messiah and the People of God: Marriage in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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consciousness of the interconnectedness of human life with all life on Earth, we can see that in Jesus God, the Lover of all that lives (Wis. 11.24), is ‘knit’ to the entire biosphere, something that the Fourth Evangelist acknowledges when stating that God’s ‘true love’ is not just humanity, but the world, the kosmos (Jn 3.16). In fact, for Jeremiah, the exile has been a kind of ‘Silent Spring’ when even the sounds of the land’s animals have vanished.10 Conversely his soundscape of the restoration includes not only human voices – wedding celebrants and pilgrims singing psalms en route to give thanks in the temple – but also the baaing of sheep (Jer. 33.10-13), surely a dramatic contrast to the previous desolation where, as the Greek Bible puts it, the land has become an erēmōsis, a desertification (7.34), what we today might call a place of anthropogenic desolation. Later, John the witness will identify Jesus as the one who ‘has the bride’ (Jn 3.29). This metaphor taps into a rich vein of imagery used by the prophets to portray God’s love for Israel. Often, though, when using this metaphor to confront the people with their disloyalty to the covenant, the prophets portray Israel or Jerusalem as a faithless, adulterous wife while God remains her constant Lover (Jer. 3.1-20; Ezek. 16; Hos. 2). We today would regard as sexist and patriarchal this setting of women’s apparent propensity for marital infidelity, over against the faithfulness of a God imagined as male. The Fourth Evangelist does at least focus on a more gender-inclusive aspect of the bridal imagery: festivity. We will find this feature developed further at a wedding in Cana (Jn 2.1-11).

3. §5 I myself did not know him (Jn 1.31, 33) The Johannine John admits twice that he did not know Jesus (Jn 1.31, 33). God, however, has instructed John that he will recognize Jesus for who he is when he sees the Spirit coming down from heaven and remaining on him. When the Spirit comes down on Jesus like a dove (§8 below) and rests on him – according to Isaiah’s prophecy of a new shoot growing out of the stump of the felled family tree of David (Isa. 11.2) – John recognizes him as the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and testifies to this. All of this shows unmistakable signs of being modelled on the story of the prophet Samuel being enabled to recognize David as God’s choice for the kingship of Israel. God tells Samuel: ‘You shall anoint for me the one whom I name to you’ (1 Sam. 16.3). Samuel’s moment of recognition also involves a manifestation of the Spirit of God coming ‘mightily upon David from that day forward’ (16.13). David will later declare that the divine spirit speaks through him (2 Sam. 23.2). The point of the gospel echo of the ancient story is, of course that the Samuellike features of John point to the David-like features of Jesus, thereby identifying him as the expected new David, the Messiah. As we will see when we come to the Shepherd Discourse in John 10, foremost among the similarities between David and Jesus is the pastoral role of shepherd-king (Chapter 10, §4). And this brings us

10. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

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back to John’s initial testimony. When citing the Scriptures, the Evangelists did not have the benefit of chapter and verse numbering, so they would refer to a passage by its most salient feature (Mk 12.26) or by its first line (15.34 citing the incipit of Ps. 22). It is always possible that a scripture citation in the gospels may be intended to evoke a whole literary unit. In Isaiah the ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ speaks of far more than making straight a way for God. If we read on, we may well hear several Johannine resonances in the continuation of the voice’s speech, from the revelation of the divine glory (Jn 1.14), right through to the concluding description of God coming like a shepherd who gathers the lambs in his arms, carries them in his bosom and gently leads those that are with young (Isa. 40.3-11; see Jn 10).

3. §6 A burning and shining lamp (Jn 5.35) The first insertion about John in the gospel’s prologue contains a clarification: he was not the light, but a witness to it (Jn 1.8). In the second insertion John has readily acknowledged that the one who comes after him ranks ahead of him (1.15). He now describes himself as ‘unworthy to untie the thong of Jesus’ sandal’ (1.27), a reminder to us ecological readers that in Jesus the Word walks on our Earth with feet that need the protection of footwear, its soles made either of wood from trees or of leather from animal skins. ‘Sandals and sandal fragments found at Masada suggest that first century CE sandals were much like those of the present day.’11 Later in the gospel Jesus will say that John was a burning and shining lamp in whose light the Jews were willing to rejoice for a while (5.35). There may well be a Samuel/David background to this contrast between lamp light and daylight. In Pseudo-Philo’s retelling of the story of Samuel’s birth there is a similar contrast. There Samuel is a lamp that will shine until David the anointed one dawns like the sun (LAB 51.4-6). The light image, as associated with David, frequently refers to his eternal rule (2 Kgs 8.19; Ps. 132.17; 2 Sam. 21.17; 1 Kgs 11.36; 15.4), an idea that flowed into the popular messianic speculation that was familiar to the Fourth Evangelist (Jn 12.34). However, the association of David with light also refers to his royal role as judge. It is as a king who rules justly that David dawns on the people ‘like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning’ (2 Sam. 23.3-4). This imagery taps into a tradition that morning is the time for the king to come to the gate of the city and dispense justice (2 Sam. 15.2-6). Thus in the psalms morning brings vindication for the wrongfully accused (Ps. 17.15; 101.8; 143.8). The connection between light and judgement can be seen in the Johannine Jesus’ saying, ‘This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’ (Jn 3.19). The Johannine Jesus’ role as judge may well be, therefore, another of his David-like features. In contrast to the synoptics, the Fourth Gospel tells of no genealogical connection between

11. D. R. Edwards, ‘Dress and Ornamentation’, in ABD II, pp. 232–8 (237).

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David and Jesus and never refers to him as son of David. However, as we will see, the Johannine Jesus’ David-like-ness comes through in subtle ways: in quotations from ‘The Psalms of David’ and in certain shades of David detectable in the narrative (see Chapters 10, §4; 15, §1).12 In the Fourth Gospel, John the lamp is a dramatic foil to Jesus the light. If the coming of the light into the world (Jn 12.46) is the dawn, then the witness of John is lamplight that becomes more and more faint and increasingly redundant as the day dawns. John will not be in the least put out when he hears that all (including some of his own former disciples) are going to Jesus (3.26). ‘He must increase’, he declares, ‘but I must decrease’ (3.29-30). So in Christian liturgical tradition the memory of John has been intertwined with the annual cycle of the sun. John’s birth is celebrated on 24 June (midsummer in the northern hemisphere) when the light begins to decrease, and correspondingly the birth of Jesus at the midwinter solstice when the light begins to increase.

3. §7 The Lamb of God (Jn 1.29, 36) John the witness twice identifies Jesus as ‘the lamb of God’ (Jn 1.29, 36). This is the second reference to the more-than-human in the gospel and this particular animal has proved to be quite an enigma. Suggestions as to its symbolic meaning include the lamb provided by God instead of Isaac (Gen. 22.8, 13), the paschal lamb (Exod. 12), the servant depicted as a lamb led to slaughter (Isa. 53.7), David the lamb who becomes the dominant ram of the flock in Enoch’s dream vision of the history of Israel with symbolic animals representing all the characters (1 Enoch 89.45). While there is much of value in all these suggestions, they should not be pushed too far, especially since several of them jar somewhat with the distinctively Johannine view of Jesus’ death as glorification. There is also the possibility that the signs of the zodiac may explain the title ‘Lamb of God’.13 Jewish representations of the zodiac such as that in the Bet Alpha Synagogue date from the fifth to sixth centuries CE, but there is ample literary evidence that in the first century CE this ancient Babylonian ‘map’ of the night sky was well established as part of the Jewish world view. After all, Gen. 1.14 permitted the lights in the heavens to be ‘for signs and for seasons and for days and years’. However, the stars were God’s creatures and servants (Amos 5.8; Job 9.9; 38.31). In no way did they control human destiny, so Jews were never to be ‘dismayed at the signs of the heavens’ (Jer. 10.2). As we have seen, several features of the temple were believed to have zodiac symbolism (Chapter 1, §6). The zodiac mapped the  seasons of the twelve-lunar-month year, so it was a visual representation of

12. M. Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel: The Johannine Reception of the Psalms (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 289–315. 13. B. J. Malina and R. L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), pp. 49–52.

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the annual agricultural cycle. Aries, or Taleh in Hebrew, a constellation believed to depict a male lamb or young ram was the first sign in the zodiac, occupying a pre-eminent position in the mid-sky. It symbolized light and corresponded to Nisan, Israel’s original vernal New Year (Exod. 12.2), the springtime month of the Passover celebration, a festival centred on the ritual eating of a male spring lamb. In the Scriptures, various new beginnings occur on the first day of the first month. In ‘a reiteration of primordial creation … the lethal watery chaos yields to habitable land’14 and Noah sees that the land is drying (Gen. 8.13); the Tent of Meeting, the prototype for the temple, is set up in the desert (Exod. 40.2, 17); the Levites start to purify the temple as part of Hezekiah’s reform (2 Chr. 29.17); the journey back from the Babylonian exile begins (Ezra 7.9). In the ancient world, people believed that the Earth stayed still while the stars moved. At New Year the stars returned to their primal points in the sky. For Jews, the month when Taleh rose at its original position on the eastern horizon of the ecliptic, the point of pre-eminence in the firmament of heaven where God had placed it on the fourth day of creation (Gen. 1.14-19), was the time when the universe returned to the way its Creator intended it to be. In some circles, notably those represented by Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls, each of the twelve signs also corresponded to a tribe of Israel. In this system the Lamb represented the tribe of Judah, King David’s tribe from which the Messiah would come. Taleh was traditionally pictured with his head twisted back, a posture only possible if the lamb’s neck had been broken. This may possibly explain ‘the lamb standing as though it had been slain’ that appears elsewhere in the Johannine writings (Rev. 5.6, 12; 13.8). The Fourth Evangelist shows a quintessentially Jewish penchant for the layering of meaning upon meaning. To accept one symbolic meaning does not require dismissing the others. However, if the title ‘Lamb’ is indeed a reference to Taleh/Aries, it would then point to the celestial origins and cosmic significance of Jesus. It would also recall the star to arise out of Jacob (Num. 24.17). This was interpreted in messianic terms, inspiring the attribution of the name ‘bar Kokhba’ (Son of the Star) to Simon bar Kosiba, the leader of the failed Second Jewish revolt (132–35 CE), although this moniker is spelt bar Koziba in rabbinic writings, implying that Simon was actually the ‘Son of a Lie’. It is interesting also to note that a prayer in the late first century BCE Psalms of Solomon for the blessing of living to see the day when the Messiah will reign is addressed to the ‘hands on’ Creator God, who decides on the precise orbits of the stars and the timing of their movements in the heavens (PsSol 18.10-12). In view of the Johannine portrayal of John as ‘Samuel’, it would be logical to identify Jesus in terms of Davidic messianism. Besides, Andrew proceeds, on the basis of John’s second testimony to Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’, to tell his brother, Simon, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (Jn 1.36, 41). Furthermore, the Lamb’s task of taking away the sin of the world (1.29) can readily be understood as the returning of the world from all its distortions to the state that

14. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, p. 73.

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the Creator intended, a renewal of the cosmos that, it was believed, would happen when the sign of Taleh/Aries was in the ascendant. A ‘new creation when the heavens and the earth and all their creatures shall be renewed’ (Jub. 1.29) is part of the end-time scenario in Jewish apocalyptic thought contemporary with the writing of the gospel (4 Ezra 7.75; 2 Bar. 32.6) and a major plank of the Evangelist’s testimony to Jesus.15 At this new beginning now signalled, in the Evangelist’s view, by the appearance of Jesus, ‘the sin of the world, ways of living that disgrace or dishonour God, ceases to be. The Lamb of God thus takes away the sin of the world just as light takes away darkness, just as life takes away death.’16 As well as being familiar with the zodiac, the audience for the gospel would also have been exposed to Roman ‘New Year’ propaganda that credited the birth of Octavian (the eventual Augustus Caesar) with ‘giving a new appearance to the whole world’. This moved the provincial assembly of Ephesus to change the calendar in 9 BCE so that the year would begin on Octavian’s birthday, the birthday of a god that ‘marked for the world the beginning of good tidings’, a day that people should regard as ‘the beginning of the breath of life for them’. The suggested identification of Jesus as Taleh/Aries may well show that the Evangelist is, to use Warren Carter’s expression, ‘mimicking and trumping’ imperial rhetoric such as this.17

3. §8 The Spirit descending from heaven like a dove (Jn 1.32) The dove is the first other-than-human member of Earth community to be mentioned in the gospel, even if, like the lamb, merely as part of a metaphor. The coming of the divine Spirit on Jesus is compared to the graceful descent of a dove from the skies. The first scriptural appearance of the dove is as the olive leafbearing messenger that the flood is receding (Gen. 8.11). The dove also occurs in the Scriptures as God’s term of endearment for Israel (Ps. 74.19), and the lover’s pet name for his bride (Song 2.14; 5.2; 6.9). In ancient zoology the dove was thought not to produce bile and, therefore, to be a peaceful and clean bird.18 We will discuss doves further when we find them for sale in the temple courts (Chapter 5, §3).

3. §9 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) From their parent Judaism Christians have inherited an appreciation of sunrise as a privileged moment of encounter with the Divine (Deut. 6.7). The daily experience of night giving way to dawn has always spoken to believers of Jesus’ resurrection,

15. J. K. Brown, ‘Creation’s Renewal in the Gospel of John’, CBQ 72, 2 (2010), pp. 275–90. 16. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, p. 52. 17. W. Carter, John and Empire: Initial Explorations (London: T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 60, 154–5. 18. Louw and Nida, 4.44.

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especially on ‘the first day of the week’ (Jn 20.1) when praise (Lauds) at sunrise is traditionally preceded by a vigil. The annual Easter Vigil is the definitive celebration of the risen Saviour’s dawning as ‘the light of the world’ (Jn 8.12; 9.5), the ‘Let there be light’ moment of the new creation. Earth-conscious believers in Jesus should treasure this ancient Christian form of prayer that is so attentive to Earth’s rhythms, and insist that it be celebrated – whether in a church building, or on a hilltop, lakeside or beach – as an authentic vigil beginning in darkness and lasting through dawn until sunrise. Might it be possible to see the return from exile – the restoration heralded by the sound of the bridegroom’s voice (Jn 3.29) – as something relevant to contemporary ecological concerns? Maybe what we of the global North need today is a return from the exile of estrangement from the Earth. This is a message especially to those of us who live urban lives divorced from the land, not knowing, for example, where the food that we choose from supermarket shelves actually comes from, and perhaps not caring what ecological or social toll may have been levied in its production, transportation and packaging. We need to rediscover our membership and embrace it. Nothing that exists is an island unto itself; … everything that holds membership in the world is an element of a seamless garment – the ‘ragged edges’ of every individual reality splay off into those of another, and the world is a wedding.19

It is only in the Fourth Gospel that Jesus baptizes (Jn 3.22), even if there appears to be some uneasiness with this memory (4.1-2). The community behind the gospel found in their experience of immersion in refreshing spring water an apt analogy for their coming to faith in Jesus. Their insight calls attention to the revelatory potential of our own experience of the gift of water flowing on our skin whenever we take a shower or bathe. Appreciating this helps us to understand baptism and its implications for our way of living in the Earth. It is no accident that our ecological decline has been accompanied by a reduction of many of the ‘earthly things’ (Jn 3.12) that we use in our worship to the status of mere tokens: in the case of baptism, a little trickle of water on the head instead of an invigorating plunge into ‘living water’. In recent years, as more and more Christian traditions retrieve the ancient practice of baptism by immersion, there has been increasing scope for artists to create baptismal pools that give visual expression to the rich symbolism – largely inspired by the Fourth Gospel – that Christianity has traditionally attached to water. When dramatically located at the entry point to the liturgical space, an authentic font invites those assembling for worship to recall their baptism by putting their hand into its flow of living water. Reflecting on this return to a more generous use of this precious Earth element in Christian ritual, the liturgist Gordon Lathrop expresses the hope that the sight of abundant clear flowing water

19. N. A. Scott, Jr., Negative Capability: Studies in the New Literature and the Religious Situation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 99.

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in ample baptismal pools ‘may awaken in us inchoate but powerful longings for both a cleaner earth and a widespread slaking of thirsts’.20 To think of ‘the sin of the world’ (Jn 1.29) from an ecological perspective, we have only to consider what Nicholas Lash has called, ‘the stain of our malevolence [that] has spread across the surface of the globe’. Pollution of the air and seas, deforestation and expansion of the deserts’ range, annihilation of innumerable species and exhaustion of non-renewable resources – all these and similar phenomena are caused by human arrogance, short sightedness and greed. Famine and mass starvation, these days, are no more ‘natural’ disasters than are deaths caused by the collapse of a building which the landlord neglected to repair. They are consequences, albeit in some measure unforeseen and unintended, of human action and inaction, of someone’s wickedness or sin.21

Leonardo Boff identifies ‘the ongoing disruption of the basic connectedness with the whole of the universe and with its Creator that the human being has introduced, fuelled and perpetuated’ as the ultimate root of the ecological crisis and thus as ‘the sin of the world’.22 Jesus came, and his disciples are sent, to ‘take away’ that sin (Jn 1.29).

20. G. W. Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), p. 106. 21. N. Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 114–15. 22. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. 81.

Chapter 4 F ROM W ILDERNESS TO F ERTILE L AND

The Fourth Gospel is not just the story of Jesus. It is also the story of how God’s commitment to the re-creation of the world will continue through the mission of his disciples, when they are sent as he was sent (Jn 20.21-23). So now, in several scenes set in Galilee, the narrative focuses on the expanding circle of Jesus’ followers. In this chapter, we first look at the Galilee location from an Earthconscious perspective. Then we ask, What did these people see in Jesus? And since today’s followers of Jesus belong to that circle of disciples, we will ask what they might see in Jesus and how they might understand his role as ‘the Christ’ from an ecological perspective. In this chapter we also encounter Jesus’ first ‘sign’ (Gk, sēmeion), performed at Cana.

4. §1 Jesus decided to go to Galilee (Jn 1.43) The action now moves from ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’ (Chapter 3, §2) to Galilee, so we will be attentive to the contrast between a wilderness area where the scenes with John the witness are set and the Lower Galilee region where Jesus now opts to go. In an insightful essay, ‘Jesus and the Ecology of Galilee’, Seán Freyne suggests that this shift into a different environment might have been a kind of ‘exodus experience’ for Jesus, bringing him from an arid desert area into a fertile land where the blessedness of God’s gift of the land to Israel was so apparent. In the Bible, as we have seen, the contrast between wilderness and fertile land/garden is often more literary trope than geography (Chapter 1, §3). From a Natural History perspective, however, the land of Israel has five principal ecological domains: ‘the rainfed (relatively humid) domain, the pastoral (semiarid) domain, the riverine domain, the maritime (coastal) domain, and the desert domain … existing in close geographic proximity to one another, but differing significantly in human habitability and potential resources’. There are, of course, transitional zones and variations depending on climate and human exploitation.1 Galilee is mainly a rain-fed region.

1. D. Hillel, The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 14.

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4. §2 A land that God looks after (Deut. 11.12) Galilee is the area of Israel that answers best to Moses’ description of the promised land as ‘a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky’, a land that God looks after ‘with eyes always on it, from the beginning to the end of the year’ (Deut. 11.11-12). This terrain, where water from precipitation, local runoff and smallscale exploitation of rain-fed aquifers makes drought farming possible, is not like Egypt, where to have a vegetable garden requires the human ingenuity and labour involved in irrigation from perennial sources (11.10). Neither is it like ‘the great and terrible wilderness’, the wasteland through which Israel had to journey to reach the land (8.15) or, for that matter, the desert area of the previous scenes in the gospel. Galilee thus exemplifies the blessings of ‘a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills’ (8.7). Memories of Galilee have surely been woven into the texture of the Fourth Gospel where flowing water shimmers ‘like a silver thread’.2 Thanks to God’s gift of water from the heavens, Galilee also answers to the biblical description, ‘a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where [Israel] will eat bread without scarcity, where [they] will lack nothing’ (Deut. 8.8-9). In the first century CE, sociologically speaking, Galilee was home to an advanced agrarian subsistence society depending on farming, viticulture, herding, fishing and horticulture. We possess an account of the exceptional fertility of the land in Galilee from Josephus, albeit a somewhat exaggerated record when it comes to population counts. The land is everywhere so rich in soil and pasturage and produces such a variety of trees that even the most indolent are tempted by these facilities to engage in agriculture. In fact it has all been cultivated by the inhabitants and there is not a single portion left waste. The cities too are plentiful and because of the richness of the soil the villages everywhere are so densely populated that even the smallest of them has a population of over fifteen thousand inhabitants. (J.W. 3.41-43)

Present-day aerial surveys, analysis of soil formation and archaeological research all indicate that at the time of Jesus the hillsides of Galilee were extensively terraced for grape and olive growing, that cereal crops were grown in the deep soil of the basins between the ridges of higher ground and that the cultivation of wheat, maize, olives, figs and grapes was possible in the environs of hilltop villages such as Nazareth because of the good topsoil and the high incidence of springs. Recent archaeological finds suggest that ‘villages in the Galilee were not poor’ and that ‘Galilean villagers in the mountains, such as at Yodefat, were entrepreneurs’ who compensated for the relative inferiority of the higher ground

2. Lightfoot, St John’s Gospel, p. 121.

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by developing pottery and wool/clothing industries.3 However, many Galileans’ lives were blighted by numerous economic pressures. There was the obligation to pay tribute and taxes in both coins and kind, to Rome and to the local ruler, Herod Antipas. The Galileans’ strong attachment to Jerusalem committed them to financial support of the temple as well. Accordingly, between one-third and one-half of all produce might well be creamed off as tax, tribute, tolls or temple tithes. The villagers among whom the Jesus movement spread would also have felt the impact of the development of two privileged urban centres: Sepphoris, rebuilt in lavish Greco-Roman style in the early decades of the first century CE, and Tiberias, founded in 19 CE as the new administrative capital, built in a desirable lake-front location close to hot sulphur pools. According to Jonathan Reed’s assessment of the adverse effect that these two cities had on Galilean peasants, ‘The impact … was first and foremost demographic and economic; they concentrated a considerable portion of the Galilean population at these two sites, housed Galilee’s socio-economic elite, and focused agricultural production onto themselves.’4 Reflecting on ‘the elaborate water system at Sepphoris, which still today beggars belief in terms of its range and technical sophistication’, Seán Freyne sees ‘a classic example of elite attitudes to natural resources. … We can only speculate’, he comments, ‘how this development affected the lives of the local villagers, but presumably it made extra demands in the need to draw water or be dependent on what could be gathered in cisterns in the rainy season.’5 A related issue, also with serious repercussions for the landscape and ecology of Galilee, was the creation of large estates (in the better agricultural land, needless to say!) that left subsistence farming families landless, reducing their breadwinners to the vulnerability of day labourers or to the last resort of brigandage. In the first disciple-gathering scene, Philip associates Jesus with his village of origin, Nazareth in Lower Galilee (Jn 1.45; 18.5, 7). At the time of Jesus, Nazareth was a fairly insignificant cluster of buildings huddled around a spring, set in a slight depression at the top of the ridge that forms the north side of the Esdraelon Valley. The population at that time has been estimated at about 480 people. They appear to have made their living mainly from agriculture, availing of the softness of the limestone bedrock to excavate the cisterns and underground storage areas that archaeologists have found.6 Their young men may also have found employment in the construction of nearby Sepphoris.

3. Aviam, ‘People, Land, Economy and Belief ’, pp. 43–4. 4. J. Reed, Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-Examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000), p. 219. 5. S. Freyne, Jesus a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 46–7. 6. J. F. Strange, ‘Nazareth’, in ABD IV, pp. 1050–1.

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4. §3 Sitting under the fig tree (Jn 1.48) The language in the disciple-gathering scenes is strongly reminiscent of the biblical personification of Wisdom that has shaped the Johannine understanding of Jesus as ‘Word made flesh’ (Chapter 2, §1). Like Wisdom who ‘is easily discerned by those who love her and is found by those who seek her’ (Wis. 6.12), who ‘goes about seeking those worthy of her and graciously appearing to them in their paths’ (6.16), Jesus attracts people. Some are fascinated by what their teacher John has said about him (Jn 1.36-39). Others are brought to him by relatives or acquaintances (1.41, 45). Again like Wisdom who takes the initiative in ‘making herself known’ (Wis. 6.13), Jesus finds Philip (a lover of horses, according to his Greek name) and invites him to become a follower (Jn 1.43).7 It is in the second of the two disciple-gathering scenes, set in Galilee, that we encounter the first item of Israelite flora to appear in the gospel and, in fact, to be mentioned in the whole Bible: the fig tree. Adam and Eve sewed its leaves into loincloths to hide their nakedness (Gen. 3.7). Ficus carica, the fig tree is thus one of the trees of the Garden of Eden, a tall tree with dense foliage providing shade whose fruit Adam and Eve enjoyed (2.16). The fig tree also figures in Moses’ list of the crops that will grow in the promised ‘good land’ where Israel will eat and be full (Deut. 8.8). Figs are among the exemplars of fruit that the spies bring back from their reconnaissance of the land (Num. 13.23). When Jesus tells Nathaniel – whose name means ‘God has given’ – that he saw him under the fig tree, this alludes to a biblical topos where the restoration of Israel is envisaged as the freedom to cultivate the land and enjoy its produce in peace (2 Kgs 18.31; Joel 2.21-22; Zech. 3.10). Because the fig tree takes at least three years to mature and its fruit takes eighty to one hundred days to ripen, this is an apt agrarian image (along with the vine) of the stability and security that can exist only when ‘nation no longer lifts sword against nation’ (Mic. 4.3-4). Micah’s prophecy of the restoration of a ravaged Zion that had formerly been reduced to rubble where wild shrubs had taken root (3.12) pictures a time when, instead of putting all their energies and resources into war, the Israelites will beat their weapons into gardening tools and set about cultivating their own vines and fig trees. Thus, while wartime was a return to the pre-creational absence of anyone to till the ground (Gen 2.5), the restoration will be the people’s return to their God-given task of cultivating and caring for the land (2.15) and enjoying its fruitfulness in security. Nathaniel, a true Israelite, sitting under a fig tree (Mic. 4.4) exemplifies this vision of restoration and, as we will see, he recognizes Jesus as God’s agent in bringing it about. In response to Nathaniel’s declaration that he is Son of God and King of Israel, Jesus promises further revelations of ‘even greater things’ (Jn 1.50-51). Then there follows the enigmatic saying about the angels of God ascending and descending

7. R. E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (The Anchor Bible. 2 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1966 and 1970), I, pp. 78–9.

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on the Human One (Gk, ho huios anthrōpou: NRSV the Son of Man). We might think of this human being as ‘the archetype of humanness … the truly Human One’.8 Jesus alludes to the ladder or stairway connecting heaven and earth that Jacob/Israel saw in his dream, an experience that moved him to call the place where it happened ‘the house of God’ and ‘the gate of heaven’ (Gen. 28.10-17). House of God would originally have referred to Bethel, a major religious site in the Northern kingdom (Amos 7.13), but for the gospel’s audience it would have pointed to all that the destroyed Jerusalem temple had stood for as God’s house, where heaven and Earth somehow converged. The idea of a ladder linking heaven and Earth comes out of a cosmology where the heavenly realm is separated from the earthly by a solid dome, the firmament. The Greek word ouranos, used in Jn 1.51, refers to this dome, the sky, but also to the realm above it, heaven. Thus we find in the Scriptures that God and the heavenly beings who dwell above the dome/the sky would have to tear it open (Isa. 64.1) or unlock its gate (Gen. 28.17) in order to come down to Earth. In the Johannine view, this is what has happened in the enfleshment of the Word (Jn 3.13). Eventually, when Jesus is lifted up from the earth on the cross (12.32-33) and returns to where he came from (6.62), it will become clear that he is the point of convergence between heaven and Earth (Chapter 12, §4). Both biblical scenes evoked in this passage hold out the promise of life lived in peace in the God-given land. In the Micah scene people sit on the ground under the shade of their flourishing fig trees. In Jacob’s dream vision God says, ‘The land on which you lie I will give to you and your offspring’ (Gen. 28.13). Both scenes portray people at ease, in physical contact with the soil of Earth. Both visions promise the blessing of peace that enables people to pursue the human vocation to ‘till the ground’ (2.5, 15). For the community behind this gospel, Nathaniel’s declaration expresses their faith in Jesus as ‘Son of God’ and ‘King of Israel’ (Jn 1.49). So we will now explore the possibility that thinking of Jesus in these terms might be relevant to contemporary ecological concerns.

4. §4 Son of God, King of Israel (Jn 1.49) Jesus’ answer to those expressing an interest in following him is ‘Come and see’ (Jn 1.39). What do they see in him? In both disciple-gathering scenes (1.35-42; 43-51) the characters apply various titles to Jesus: the Messiah, the one Moses and the prophets wrote about, the Son of God, the King of Israel. With the exception of ‘the one Moses wrote about’, a reference to an expected prophet like Moses (Deut. 18.18), these are all royal designations that will reappear throughout the gospel right up to the original ending where the Evangelist’s motivation in writing is stated: ‘so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of

8. W. Wink, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), p. 154.

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God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (Jn 20.31). From our ecological perspective, we might ask if there is any way in which believing that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, could spell good news for the Earth. This is a pressing question because the biblical use of kingly rule as a metaphor for humankind’s engagement with the other-than-human creation – the so-called mandate to dominate of Gen. 1.28 – is sometimes held responsible for our planet’s ecological woes.9 Uncovering something of the scriptural underlay to the Evangelist’s claim that Jesus is Messiah, Christ and Son of God may indicate an Earth-sensitive way forward. The origins of these designations in ancient Israel’s royal traditions would imply that Jesus fulfils the best ideals of Israelite kingship, even if in an unexpected way. He is actually the diametric opposite of a king, an anti-king, as his response to Pilate’s question, ‘You are a king then?’ suggests. ‘“King” [in quotation marks] is your word’ (Jn 18.37 NEB). Going by writings such as Psalm of Solomon 17 (our earliest extant text to use the term Messiah in a precise sense), the 4QIsaiah Pesher and 4QFlorilegium, with its reference to the Branch of David,10 it seems that in the late Second Temple period the Isaian prophecy about the shoot growing from the felled family tree of Jesse (Isa. 11.1-10) was widely regarded as expressing that hope for a Davidic ‘anointed one’ that believers in Jesus would eventually claim had now been fulfilled. The Evangelist has already hinted at this in the scene where John sees the Spirit coming down and resting on Jesus (Jn 1.32, alluding to Isa. 11.2). With our anthropocentric mindset, we tend to focus on Isaiah’s portrait of a righteous king filled with the divine spirit whose just rule benefits the poor. Even the paratextual features of our modern printed Bibles – stanza divisions, editorial sub-headings – may discourage us from reading beyond verse 5. To read on, though, would be to include in the ‘job specification’ for the ideal king the realization of that paradisial vision that begins with ‘The wolf shall lie down with the lamb.’ In favour of this reading, verse 10 clearly forms an inclusion with verse 1 and, in fact, Paul’s rather informal citation of the ‘root of Jesse’ passage in Rom. 15.12 would suggest that he would have regarded Isa. 11.1-10 as a literary unit. The question arises: Would it be consistent with what we know of the Israelite ideal of kingship to include in it Isaiah’s Eden-like vision of a cosmic harmony that affects the whole world with its plants, animals, climate, atmosphere? This is an important question because if, in the Johannine view, bringing about a situation where ‘they will not hurt or destroy’ (Isa. 11.9) is an integral part of what Jesus the Christ was sent to do, then it would also be what his disciples are meant to be doing. ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (Jn 20.21).

9. L. White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, in Science 155 (1967), pp. 1203–7; N. C. Habel, An Inconvenient Text: Is a Green Reading of the Bible Possible? (Adelaide: Australasian Theological Forum Press, 2009), pp. 1–10. 10. OTP II, pp. 665–69 (667); García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, pp. 186, 136.

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4. §5 To rule the world in holiness and righteousness (Wis. 9.3) We have already seen that ancient Near Eastern kings were perceived as gardeners and even as the source of their garden’s fruitfulness (Chapter 1, §2). In Israelite royal traditions, kingship exercised righteously is often described in imagery depicting the flourishing of the Earth. As we have seen (Chapter 3, §6), it is like the daylight on which so much of life on Earth depends. ‘One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land’ (2 Sam. 23.3-4). In the Psalter, the Prayers of David the Son of Jesse conclude with Psalm 72 where a description of the ideal king’s (Solomon’s?) reign climaxes in a rhapsodic image of a bumper crop of grain ripe for the harvest, a passage most probably alluded to in Jn 4.35-38. A hermeneutics of suspicion might cavil that the psalm’s description of the just king’s beneficial effect is fundamentally anthropocentric, since the fruitfulness of the land is seen as principally for human benefit. However, there are biblical portrayals of kingship where the king values, respects and admires the other-thanhuman creation for its own sake. Solomon, who prayed for wisdom at the outset of his reign (1 Kgs 3.9), is remembered for his knowledge and appreciation of the wonders of the Earth. As a true ancient Near Eastern gardener-king, ‘he would speak of trees, from the cedar that is in the Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish’ (1 Kgs 4.33). The attribution of Proverbs to Solomon is part of this tradition, crediting him with such powers of observation as those displayed in ‘his’ delightful proverbs about the ability of ants, badgers, locusts and lizards to adapt and survive (Prov. 30.24-28). As Norman Habel explains in his ecological reading of Job in this series, a wise person observes and analyses phenomena in creatures, discovering their ‘inner code or innate wisdom’, what the Bible frequently calls their ‘way’ (Heb., derek). ‘The “way” of something reflects its essential character, its internal impulse, its innate wisdom whether it be the “way” of an eagle in the sky or the “way” of a snake on a rock’ (Prov. 30.19).11 This ‘way’ is actually, as John Ashton has suggested, ‘an alternative formulation’ of the Logos principle (Chapter 2, §2), ‘God’s providential plan for the world’, ‘concealed from all except God’ (Job 28.12-23), but somehow intuited in fleeting glimpses of the creation.12 A fascinating reworking of the memory of Solomon as someone who was wise because he understood ‘the way’ of the creation is found in the Wisdom of Solomon. By this stage of his literary afterlife (late first century BCE to mid-first century CE), a thoroughly sapientialized pseudepigraphical Solomon has become a Hellenistic polymath with expertise in cosmology, geology, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, demonology, psychology, botany and pharmacology. He is rigorously scientific in his efforts to learn from ‘Wisdom, the fashioner of all things’.

11. N. C. Habel, Finding Wisdom in Nature: An Eco-Wisdom Reading of the Book of Job (Earth Bible Commentary 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), p. 12. 12. Ashton, ‘Riddles and Mysteries’, p. 340.

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John: An Earth Bible Commentary For it is [Wisdom] who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild animals, the powers of spirits and the thoughts of human beings, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots. (Wis. 7.17-20)

The source of the king’s encyclopaedic knowledge is none other than the generative force that made the world in the first place. To the extent that a king is imbued with this wisdom, the land – the ‘world’ for which he is responsible – will flourish. The multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world, and a sensible king is the stability of any people. (Wis. 6.24)

The parallelism of Pseudo-Solomon’s poetry arouses the suspicion of androcentrism: that his ‘world’ is actually the world of people and not what we today would recognize as the interconnected biotic community of all life on Earth. This suspicion seems to be confirmed by the young king’s prayer: O God of my ancestors and Lord of mercy, who have made all things by your word, and by your wisdom have formed humankind to have dominion over the creatures you have made, and rule the world in holiness and righteousness, and pronounce judgment in uprightness of soul, give me the wisdom that sits by your throne, and do not reject me from among your servants. (Wis. 9.1-4)

Interestingly though, it is the poetic parallelism in this prayer that ultimately deconstructs the notion of rule, by qualifying it with the precision, ‘in holiness and righteousness … in uprightness of soul’. In the Wisdom of Solomon, this wise rule is the antithesis to the exploitative attitude that characterizes the ungodly rulers who flaunt their unfettered freedom to exploit Earth’s resources: Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full as in youth. … everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this our lot. … Let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. (Wis. 2.6, 9, 11)

In contrast to this, ‘the strength to rule all things’ bestowed on Adam (Wis. 10.2) is modelled on God’s way with the creation: ‘ruling all things in mercy’ (15.1).

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The nexus between the creativity of God and the king’s exercise of his rule that is such a strong characteristic of the Wisdom of Solomon opens up a way into reading the Fourth Gospel from the perspective of Earth. If this gospel was written so that its readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed king, then the life given in his name (Jn 20.31) is not just for human beings but for the whole of God’s creation. Furthermore, Jesus’ turning upside down of the concept of kingship models a way of subverting the so-called mandate to dominate in Gen. 1.28. As Tina Beattie notes, with reference to the application of the titles ‘Teacher’ (Gk, didaskalos) and ‘Lord’ (Gk, kurios) to Jesus (Jn 13.13-14), but with equal aptness to the title ‘king’, ‘the word “master” is not forbidden but transformed.’13 The convergences between Pseudo-Solomonic and Johannine thought are particularly valuable because the Book of Wisdom – a product of Hellenized Diaspora Judaism around the turn of the era – gives us what is probably our nearest approximation to the theology and cosmology that has shaped the Fourth Evangelist’s understanding of Jesus.

4. §6 There was a wedding (Jn 2.1) ‘Feasts are made for laughter; wine gladdens life’ (Eccl. 10.19). This scene exudes that joyful atmosphere that we noted with regard to John the witness, ‘the friend of the bridegroom’ (Jn 3.29; Chapter 3, §4). A traditional Northern Israelite wedding might continue for seven days (Tob. 11.19), the festivity sustained by the bridegroom’s provision of free-flowing wine ‘to gladden the human heart’ (Ps. 104.15). Here Jesus takes over this aspect of the bridegroom’s role and brings it to a new level. Cana is most probably Khirbet Qana, an unwalled village about fourteen kilometres north of Nazareth. Archaeological surveys of Cana and its environs have revealed the remains of industries and quite impressive public structures, all indicating that this rural Galilean settlement was a thriving village of some socio-economic prosperity, at least for a good number of its inhabitants. At the time of Jesus it had a population of about 1200. The remains of two dovecotes (columbaria; see Chapter 5, §3), a small glass-making industry and a tanning or dyeing installation would suggest that the people of Cana diversified their activities beyond agriculture. Prior to the First Jewish Revolt there was no substantial road connecting Cana with other towns or villages. There was simply a network of paths that could be traversed on foot or on a donkey.14

13. T. Beattie, ‘A Discipleship of Love: Mary of Bethany and the Ministry of Women’, The Month 30 (1997), pp. 171–5 (173). 14. C. T. McCollough, ‘City and Village in Lower Galilee: The Import of the Archaeological Excavations at Sepphoris and Khirbet Qana (Cana) for Framing the Economic Context of Jesus’, in The Galilean Economy at the Time of Jesus (ed. D. Fiensy and R. K. Hawkins; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 49–74 (62–7).

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In this scene, water makes its second appearance in the gospel. The first was the cool spring water in which John ritually immersed people so that the refreshment they experienced would speak to them of renewal (Chapter 3, §3). Now we have water poured into jars made of hewn stone, rather than pottery, because this water is intended for the guests to wash themselves before eating, in keeping with the Jewish rites of purification. From later Jewish writings we learn that stone did not contract ritual contamination. Storage jars holding up to fifty litres were commonly used for oil, wine or corn. However, vessels ‘holding twenty or thirty gallons’ (Jn 2.6) would be exceptionally large for use as water jars. Six of them would have held a total of about 650 litres. A certain exaggeration suits the Evangelist’s purpose of conveying the overflowing abundance when the water is drawn out and tasted as ‘the good (Gk, kalos: beautiful) wine’ (2.10). In the prophetic literature, abundance of wine symbolizes Israel’s restoration in the final days. The time is surely coming … when the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. (Amos 9.13-14)

As we saw with regard to the fig tree (§3 above), the creation’s renewal after a period of destructive conflict comes about when people are again free to return to their gardening vocation. Amos’ prophecy has to do with the reinstatement of the Davidic dynasty – a powerful symbol of the return of the ‘golden age’ when the twelve tribes, ruled by their own king, lived in freedom to cultivate their own land and enjoy its produce. This theme is developed in the pseudepigrapha in delightfully hyperbolic ways. ‘In those days the whole earth will be worked in righteousness, all of her planted with trees. … And he who plants a vine on her will produce wine for plenitude’ (1 Enoch 10.18-19).15 The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, roughly contemporary with the final editing of the Fourth Gospel, goes even further. It claims that when the Messiah is revealed, ‘The earth will yield fruit ten thousandfold. And on one vine will be a thousand branches, and one branch will produce a thousand clusters, and one cluster will produce a thousand grapes, and one grape will produce a cor of wine’ (2 Bar. 29.5-6).16 A cor was probably about 230 litres (Josephus, Ant. 15.14). Conversely, a lack of wine is one of the symptoms of a world out of kilter with the Creator’s intentions. When Earth goes awry, according to Isaiah,

15. OTP I, p. 18. 16. OTP I, p. 630.

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The wine dries up, The vine languishes, All the merry-hearted sigh … There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine; All joy has reached its eventide The gladness of the earth is banished. (Isa. 24.7, 11)

The enological metaphors in the lament for a languishing Earth (Isa. 24.1-13), from which these lines are taken, portray the undoing of the creation, the antithesis of what God intends for the Earth, a picture that, as we saw earlier with regard to Isaiah 24 (Chapter 2, §2), is the antithesis of the Logos, understood as the Creator’s design for the creation. These metaphors throw into relief the image Isaiah presents in subsequent verses where God invites all peoples to ‘a feast of well-aged wines strained clear’ (Isa. 25.6). ‘This is our God’ (25.9), the Fourth Evangelist would say, as revealed by Jesus at Cana. Here is the Wisdom of God appearing on Earth, inviting us to her banquet, to drink the wine she has mixed (Prov. 9.5. Chapter 2, §1). However, awareness of the wine’s symbolism does not exclude appreciation of its actuality within the world of the narrative. This story speaks of and to people who experience ‘all the natural delectabilities of wine: taste, color, bouquet; its manifold graces; the way it complements food and enhances conversation; and its sovereign power to turn evenings into occasions, to lift eating beyond nourishment to conviviality’.17 The Cana wedding scene is our first encounter in the gospel with actual eating and drinking: the means by which human beings express and experience their interconnectedness with and dependence on other members of the Earth community, because to eat and drink is to be the beneficiary of the lifegiving ways of the garden of the Earth.18

4. §7 On the third day (Jn 2.1) ‘The third day’ is part of a sequence of days in the early scenes of the gospel. ‘Day one’ when John testifies is followed by three further days, each called ‘the next day’ (1.29, 35, 43). Various scholars have suggested that this sequence (that may have been clearer in an earlier recension) is an intentional evocation of the six days of the original creation (Gen. 1.3-31).19 However, we should probably go with what the Evangelist actually says: that the Cana wedding scene took place ‘on the third day’. It was on the third day that the Creator made the Earth appear and caused it to produce every kind of vegetation, including, of course, the vine

17. R. F. Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (New York: Modern Library 2002 [1967]), p. 91. 18. Wirzba, Food & Faith, pp. 37–8. 19. Brown, The Gospel According to John, I, pp. 105–6; Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary, p. 66.

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(Gen. 1.9-13). In Cana, on this third day of the new creation, non-elite Galileans beset by taxation and rents, struggling to achieve a secure food supply, suddenly find themselves enjoying ‘bottomless cups’ of quality wine! Besides, Jesus is soon to give a further significance to ‘three days’ (Jn 2.19-20). In other writings from the early Jesus movement ‘the third day’ – probably an allusion to Hos. 6.2 – commonly refers to the day of Jesus’ resurrection (e.g. 1 Cor. 15.4; Mt. 16.21; Lk. 24.7, 21, 46). There has already been a hint that the wine Jesus provides is connected with his hour (Jn 2.4). As the gospel unfolds, it will become clear that the new creation, symbolized by Jesus’ provision of abundant wine will be the outcome of his death and resurrection. This is why this first sign (2.11) is a manifestation of Jesus’ glory. As John Painter explains, ‘In the signs the loving-kindness of the faithful God is present as a token, or as firstfruits, of God’s purpose to make creation whole.’20

4. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) The earliest Jesus followers believed that he embodied the best of the Israelite royal ideal. The Earth-respecting dimensions of that ideal model for us a contemplative attitude to the creation: paying attention to it, marvelling at it, learning from it. They also challenge the principles by which much of our world has been operating in recent centuries, particularly the fallacy that ‘might is right’ (Wis. 2.11). To presume that the mere fact that we have the technological ability to exhaust Earth’s resources or to modify Earth’s processes entitles us to do so is surely the great stupidity of our age. Like ‘the first formed father of the world’, in need of Wisdom to ‘deliver him from his transgression’ (10.1), we need Wisdom to show us a way of empathy with Earth that would completely subvert our notion of dominion over it. Earth-conscious readers of the Fourth Gospel may well find that Jesus-Wisdom offers a paradigm for this work. All of the biblical prophecies that the Evangelist draws on in the disciplegathering scenes paint a vision for Israel’s restoration that is inclusive of the land and everything that lives in it. It is quite legitimate for us, reading from our ecological perspective, to apply these visions to the whole Earth, as, in fact, the authors of 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch did. This is one of the ways in which attention to the Evangelist’s scriptural sources can ‘turn up the volume’ of the voice of Earth in the gospel text so that we can hear it today. For example, Micah’s prophecy of restoration, recalled by the ‘snapshot’ of Nathaniel reposing under a fig tree, a vision of people involved in food production rather than war is a poignant reminder that agriculture is so often a major casualty in war zones. Moreover, it is frequently ecological damage, with resultant famine and displacement of peoples, that is the root cause of conflict.

20. J. Painter, ‘The Prologue of John: Bridge into a New World’, in Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania (ed. J. Havea, D. J. Neville and E. Wainwright (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), pp. 73–92 (89).

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The building of Tiberias and the rebuilding of Sepphoris nearby would have impacted seriously on the landscape, demographics and economy of Galilee, in ways not dissimilar to today’s massive conversion of family-based subsistence farming economies to agribusiness, forcing the landless poor to crowd into cities and consolidating land into agribusiness farms – ‘the massive industrial spreads that accelerate the soil erosion and pesticide poisoning and monoculture reliance that are ruining the earth’.21 While field-scale systems are not always damaging in these ways, and while there are situations where large-scale farming makes sense, there are many instances in our world today that must be counted among ‘the acts of contempt for the work of God’s hands’ that are at the root of present ecological destruction.22 Moreover, as Bill McKibben notes, this kind of displacement of people often results in a tragic loss of the local knowledge that is crucial for the well-being of the land, its flora and fauna. This is because ‘small farmers are the principal noticers of our world’.23 ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’ (Jn 1.14) in a particular location. The parables and sayings remembered by his followers show that ‘Jesus from Nazareth’ (Jn 1.45) had what we today would call a sense of place. In our world the widespread loss of this sense is at the root of much ecological damage. Without that real connection, a place can so easily be seen as merely exploitable. Our contemporary multinational business structures allow people to make commercial decisions that will result in the ravaging of faraway places that they have never seen and where they will never live. As Wendell Berry continually insists, we need to cultivate affection for our place.24 A sense of place is part of the way in which ‘the world is a wedding’.25 ‘We marry ourselves to the creation by knowing and cherishing a particular place, just as we join ourselves to the human family by marrying a particular man or woman.’26 Just as we find it easier to love actual people than to love all humanity, so our care for the planet is more easily expressed locally. Ecological action at local level is necessarily relational; we cannot love a place that we do not know. Caring for the planet begins with learning about the small neighbourhood of the planet where we live, and working out how we can care for this place, our home that we know intimately, by name (Jn 10.3).

21. B. McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2005), p. 39. 22. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, p. 13. 23. B. McKibben, Address at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego. 24. W. E. Berry, ‘It all turns on affection’ (The Jefferson Lecture; Washington DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 2012). 25. Scott, Negative Capability, p. 99. 26. S. R. Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston: Beacon, 1998), p. 13.

Chapter 5 A T THE C ENTRE OF THE E ARTH

After a few days in Capernaum in the company of his family (Jn 2.12), Jesus and his disciples go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. As this is the gospel’s first mention of the temple we recall the Jewish views of the temple that are an essential underpinning for our Earth-conscious reading, especially since the temple was regarded as a representation of the creation (Chapter 1, §5). In this chapter we will approach the temple via a consideration of pilgrimage and of the Passover festival which is at hand as Jesus arrives in Jerusalem.

5. §1 Jesus went up to Jerusalem (Jn 2.13) The Fourth Gospel portrays Jesus as one of ‘those who have the pilgrim ways in their hearts’ (Ps. 84.5), those who see their life as ‘a “pilgrim path” to the living God  – and who find in that thought their strength and power’.1 This attitude is all of a piece with the Israelite conviction that the land/the Earth belongs to God and that the people who live in it are sojourners (Lev. 25.23; 1 Chr. 29.15). Pilgrimage from Capernaum, built on the shore of the lowest freshwater lake on Earth, to Jerusalem, built on Mount Zion which rises to 740 metres above sea level, obviously involved going up. The final approach to the city through the Judean hills was an arduous ascent and then, on arrival, pilgrims had to climb the steps and ramps leading to the monumental platform that Herod the Great had constructed around the temple. In the Psalter a cluster of psalms traditionally associated with pilgrimage are called ‘Songs of Ascents’ (Ps. 120-134). In the Scriptures, pilgrimage to the temple is frequently referred to as going up to God’s house (Isa. 38.22), ascending God’s hill (Ps. 24.3), or simply as going up (2 Chr. 36.23). The joy of going on pilgrimage ‘up to Jerusalem’ is movingly expressed in Isa. 30.29. ‘You shall have a song as in the night when a holy festival is kept; and gladness of heart, as when one sets out to the sound of the flute.’ Psalm 122 gives voice to the exhilaration of pilgrims as their feet stand at last in the holy city. Both

1. F.-L. Hossfeld and E. Zenger, Psalms 2 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), pp. 348, 355.

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Philo (Spec. 1.12, 69-70) and Josephus (Ant. 4.203-204; J.W. 6.9.3) bear witness to the joy of the pilgrimage experience in the first century CE.2 In the Fourth Gospel, with its characteristic layering of different levels of meaning, the pilgrimage ascent (Jn 2.13; 7.8; Gk, anabainō: go up, ascend) hints at Jesus’ ascent to the heavenly realm (Jn 3.13; 20.17).

5. §2 The Passover of the Jews was near (Jn 2.13) By the time of Jesus, the post-exilic centralization of the cult in Jerusalem was so complete (Chapter 10, §5) that, while Passover was still a domestic ritual, it had also become a national event celebrated by so many pilgrims, from both the land of Israel and the Diaspora, that the boundaries of the city had to be temporarily extended for the duration of the festival. Josephus’ claim that almost three million people attended, even if somewhat exaggerated, gives us a sense of the crowds streaming into Jerusalem (J.W. 2.10, 224, 280; 6.421, 423-426). To participate fully would mean staying there for at least a week. The rituals included bringing a lamb to the temple to be slaughtered by the priests, bringing it home or to the house or tent where one was staying, using a sprig of hyssop (Chapter 15, §5) to sprinkle some of its blood at the entrance in memory of the sign that the destroying angel of the Exodus should pass over the homes of the Israelites (Exod. 12.13, 23), and eating the lamb with bitter herbs and unleavened bread at an evening meal, celebrated in family or fictive kinship groups, where special blessings were pronounced and the Hallel Psalms sung (Ps. 113-118). This meal inaugurated seven days during which only unleavened bread would be eaten. The Fourth Gospel is vague about the extent to which Jesus participates in the festival. This is in keeping with the Evangelist’s overall project of showing that believers enjoy in the risen Jesus everything that the now discontinued sacrificial system represented. In the world of the narrative, however, it would be quite normal for a group, such as Jesus and his band of disciples, to celebrate the Passover meal in their accommodation in Jerusalem. This raises the question of Jesus’ participation in animal sacrifice. For ancient Israel, sacrifice was not primarily an act of violence against animals, but an offering to God of a valuable portion of what one needed for the survival of one’s household. As Norman Wirzba explains, ‘The offering of the animal was a self-offering because in presenting the animal one also offered the hours of personal care that nurtured the animal to a full life. One offered one’s future life because for a farmer or pastoralist one’s future was inextricably tied to the health and breeding potential of the herd.’3 The costliness of the offering expressed the recognition that even though human beings work hard to rear and cultivate the food on which their lives depend, it is still the gift of the

2. For an attractive account of the common people’s experience of Passover, see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE – 66 CE (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 128–39. 3. Wirzba, Food and Faith, p. 118.

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creating and sustaining Source of all life, growth and fertility. This costliness was, no doubt, reflected in the price that pilgrims travelling from distant homes would have paid to buy a sacrificial lamb in Jerusalem. The other side to sacrifice was that the Passover lamb – and, in the case of other sacrifices, some of the meat of the victim – was returned to the worshippers to be enjoyed at a meal that was believed to be an experience of the divine hospitality. As we have already seen (Chapter 3, §7), Passover was celebrated on the fourteenth of Nisan, ‘the first month’ (Exod. 12.2, 18), the original vernal New Year. This was the spring equinox when flocks were moved to summer pastures. Passover recalled a new beginning for God’s flock: led out of slavery in Egypt ‘by the hand of Moses and Aaron’, to be guided through the wilderness (Ps. 77.20; 78.52) to the good grazing land of Israel (Ezek. 34.14). The seven days of unleavened bread – part of the Passover festival at the time of Jesus – are associated in the Scriptures with the Israelites’ haste to depart from Egypt (Exod. 12.33-34; Deut. 16.3-4), but they probably go back to an ancient springtime celebration of the barley harvest (the first crop to ripen) when bread was eaten unleavened (as barley bread had to be), and thus in as near as possible to the grain’s original state. The discarding of old yeast on the first of the seven days (Exod. 12.15) signalled a fresh start, since leaven – a lump of old dough in an advanced state of fermentation – was regarded as an agent of contamination (1 Cor. 5.8; Mt. 16.6). From extra-biblical sources we catch intimations of the cosmic significance that was attached to Passover. According to Aristobulus, for example, Passover occurs at an exceptional time when both the sun and the moon pass through the first section of the zodiac (cited by Eusebius in Eccl. Hist. 7.32.17-18).4 For Philo, Passover is a representation of ‘the beginning’ (Spec. 2.15). The seven days of unleavened bread recall the seven days of creation (2.156) and the unleavened bread is a reminder of the original simplicity of the earliest human beings and a summons to frugality in everyday life (2.159-161).5 Passover was thus widely understood at the time of Jesus as a celebration of the renewal of the creation (Chapter 3, §7).

5. §3 No more traders in God’s house (Zech. 14.21) On arrival within the temple precinct (Gk, hieron: the entire temple area with its buildings, courts and storerooms), Jesus finds a market in progress where cattle, sheep and doves are being sold to pilgrims. The money they pay is in lieu of an animal from their own flock or herd. The centralization of the Passover Festival in Jerusalem – and for that matter the promotion of the three great pilgrim feasts (Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles) – has made the rearing of sacrificial animals lucrative, at least for the elite who control the enterprise. Pilgrims wishing to pay the obligatory half-shekel temple tax (Exod. 30.11-16) are not permitted to use

4. OTP II, p. 837. 5. Hayward, The Jewish Temple, p. 134.

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Greek or Roman coins because these feature human images (Exod. 20.4). Tyrian coinage, which bears only a designation of the value of the coin, is acceptable, so this is provided, no doubt at a premium, by the money changers. Respect for a religious instinct to avoid bringing anything suggestive of idolatry into the temple is distorted into a money-making operation. Jesus claims that the selling of sacrificial animals and the money changing has made his Father’s house into a house of trade (Jn 2.16). This is the first time in the narrative that Jesus has referred to God as his Father, a title to be discussed below (Chapter 7, §3). Jesus’ accusation recalls the last few words of Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming day when there will no longer be traders in God’s house (Zech. 14.21). In Jewish exegesis, to cite the climactic conclusion of a prophecy is to evoke the whole message. So, for Jesus, the presence of traders in the temple is indicative of Jerusalem’s failure to be the holy place from which living waters flow out to all the Earth (Zech. 14.8). The Greek, oikos emporiou puts us in mind of our English word emporium: a building intended for buying and selling. As ‘house of God’, the temple was supposed to symbolize the world as God’s creation, but instead it had become a reflection of its functionaries’ view of the world as a resource to profit from. Intended to be the cosmic centre from which abundant life streamed out, the temple had become a hub for the accumulation of wealth. In fact, Herod the Great’s renovations – forty-six years in progress, according to Jn 2.20 – had turned the temple area into a Roman-style agora. With its storehouses and treasuries, the temple had degenerated into a ‘repository of large quantities of money and goods extracted from the surplus product of the peasant economy’.6 The temple’s layout, representing the order and proportion of the whole of creation, had profound ethical implications, as demonstrated in Ezekiel’s concern for correct measurements in the restored temple (Ezek. 40-42), a figurative expression of an ethical concern over corrupt commercial transactions that distorted the divinely ordained correct measure, balance and proportion in the created world.7 Exactly what Jesus’ view of the temple’s sacrificial system was and the extent to which he participated in it is impossible to know, but his act of prophetic symbolism certainly makes the point that he believed the temple was not functioning as it should. In the Johannine account of this scene, Jesus seems to pay particular attention to those selling the doves or, in some English versions, the pigeons. In English, a dove is a bird of the columbidae family with a pointed tail while a pigeon is a heavier bird with a square-shaped tail, but in the New Testament the Greek peristera does not make this distinction.8 We have already encountered the graceful descent of a

6. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary, pp. 78–9. Hanson and Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus, pp. 131–59. Carter, John and Empire, p. 159. Freyne, The Jesus Movement and Its Expansion: Meaning and Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), pp. 176–85. 7. Barker, Creation, p. 43. 8. Louw and Nida, 4.44.

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dove from the sky symbolizing the coming of the Spirit on Jesus (Chapter 3, §5). In the first century, doves were raised – often in underground columbaria with nesting niches carved out of the soft limestone – for their meat, for their dung and for sale as sacrificial offerings in the temple. Dove dung was used as a fertilizer or burned as a fuel (2 Kgs 6.25).9 Jesus fashions a whip out of cord made of fibre. Interestingly some early manuscripts insert ōs to soften this to ‘something like a whip’. Similarly, variations among early manuscripts would suggest that ‘sheep and cattle’ were added into verse 15 to avoid the embarrassing suggestion that Jesus whipped people. Unlike the sheep and cattle which would have moved at the crack of the whip, the caged doves depended on their sellers to be carried out. It seems, though, that Jesus’ anger is aimed particularly at those who sold doves to pilgrims who could not afford lambs (Lev. 5.11; 12.8). Perhaps the Fourth Evangelist regarded this feature of the trade in the temple as particularly symptomatic of the denial of access ‘without charge’ (Isa. 55.1), whereas Jesus believed in the freedom of the Father’s house for all (Jn 8.36). The removal of traders from the temple signifies that the day spoken of in Zechariah has dawned, a never-ending day (Zech. 14.6-7), when a fountain shall be opened in Jerusalem (13.1). So, like the first sign pointing to Jesus’ hour, understood as the Earth having its wedding (Isa. 62.4), this second sign points to the hour as the rebuilding, restoration or renewal of the temple. Jesus responds to the question about his authority for performing this sign with a riddle – an explanation of the hour that will only make sense to those who understand that the real temple (Gk, naos: temple, sanctuary, as distinct from the hieron: the whole temple area) is Jesus’ body. The Fourth Gospel is unique in placing this scene at the outset of Jesus’ ministry, but it concurs with the synoptics in suggesting that it was Jesus’ uncompromising zeal for what the temple represented that ultimately cost him his life. The Scripture that the disciples think of is slightly fine-tuned to convey this idea. ‘Zeal for your house will devour me’ (not ‘has devoured me’, as in Ps. 69.9). In English we speak of consuming commitment or of someone being eaten up with zeal. A similar Johannine double entendre here suggests what the sign points to: the events of Jesus’ hour when he will become the new and neverto-be-destroyed temple where God is accessible to all.

5. §4 Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night (Jn 19.39) The scene where Nicodemus comes to Jesus (Jn 3.1-21) follows a characteristic Johannine structure: dialogue becomes discourse as Jesus’ interlocutor fades out of the scene and the readers/hearers find themselves being addressed. Even the pronoun ‘you’ changes to the plural in verse 7. The setting of this scene at night may indicate that, like Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, a man of some

9. E. Firmage, ‘Zoology (Animal Profiles)’, in ABD VI, pp. 1119–51 (1144–5).

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religious standing in Jerusalem, wishes to keep his interest in Jesus secret out of fear (19.38). However, it also portrays Nicodemus as someone coming to the light. This would fit with his subsequent appearances in the gospel where he comes across as someone who ‘does what is true’ (3.21 RSV; 7.50-52). From our Earthconscious perspective, the symbolism should not obscure the reality of night-time in a narrative that is so attentive to the seasons and phases of the Earth. There is an irony about Nicodemus’ self-assured opening to the conversation, ‘We know’ (Jn 3.2). The audience, having heard the gospel’s prologue, realizes that Nicodemus has quite a limited understanding of what it might mean to say that Jesus comes from God and that God is with him. As we will see, quite a few characters in the gospel have a propensity for presuming that their knowledge is adequate. As this familiar human flaw has serious ecological implications for our world today, we will explore the theme of knowledge in more detail later (Chapter 10, §3). In Nicodemus’ second contribution to the conversation a little wordplay sustains the dramatic irony. Jesus talks about people receiving a new kind of existence by being born anōthen, ‘from above’ (Jn 3.3). Nicodemus understands anōthen in an equally valid way, linguistically speaking, as ‘again’, and finds Jesus’ apparent suggestion of a repetition of physical birth nonsensical. Birth ‘from above’ – from the realm of God above the skies means being ‘born of God’ (1 Jn 3.9; 4.7; 5.4, 18). This involves being born anew ‘of water and the spirit’ (Jn 3.5). We have already seen how the baptisms performed by John and Jesus gave people a bodily experience of immersion in refreshing water that spoke to them of renewal (Chapter 3, §3). The combination ‘water and the spirit’ taps into a rich scriptural tradition, of great appeal to the Fourth Evangelist, where flowing water, or water generously poured out, symbolizes the bestowal of the divine spirit (Isa. 44.3; Ezek. 39.29; Joel 2.28-29; Chapter 16, §1–§2).

5. §5 The kingdom of God (Jn 3.5) Birth anew by water and the Spirit is the precondition for seeing or entering ‘the kingdom of God’. This scene contains the only Johannine reference to what the synoptics present as the kernel of Jesus’ message: the proclamation of God’s reign (Gk, basileia: kingship, the exercise of kingship, reign, a territory ruled as a kingdom). The basileia would have meant different things to different people, depending where they were situated on the spectrum of Jewish diversity in the late Second Temple period: the restoration of Israel in its integrity by the ingathering of the scattered twelve tribes, the readmission of humankind to paradise (Ezek. 36.35), the flourishing of people, animals and plants (Deut. 30.5.9), the removal of disabilities (Isa. 35.5-6), being guests at a banquet hosted by God (Isa. 25.6), a fresh outpouring of the Spirit, the building of a new temple where true worship would be offered, the pilgrimage of all nations to that temple, the broadening out of ‘the land’ to encompass the whole world as the basileia extends ‘to the ends of the earth’ (Ps. 72.8; Sir. 44.21), a renewal of Israel’s holiness, a final judgement in favour of

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the ‘children of the light’, and the possibility of a life for the righteous with God beyond death (sometimes called ‘the resurrection’, as in Mk 12.23). It was believed that the aeon of the basileia would be ushered in by a divinely appointed agent, but as we have seen (Chapter 4, §4) the variety of ‘job specifications’ for this figure is a similar reflection of the factionalism of first century CE Judaism. James D. G. Dunn warns that all these different basileia ‘narratives’ should not be seen as jigsaw pieces that we can put together into a coherent picture. They are more like ‘flashes of insight’ or ‘variations’ on the theme of trust that God’s intentions for the creation are being worked out in God’s good time.10 This brings us very near the Johannine concept of the life-giving Logos as ‘God’s providential plan for the world’ (Chapter 2, §2)11 In fact, John Ashton would say that ‘life, the gift of inestimable worth promised to those who accept Jesus’ message, is the Johannine equivalent of the synoptic kingdom of God’.12

5. §6 The on-Earth-things (Jn 3.12) From our Earth-conscious perspective, Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus contains a particularly interesting word, epigeia (Gk, epi: upon + gē: earth), the on-Earth-things or ‘earthly things’ (Jn 3.12), as distinct from the ‘heavenly things’ (epiourania; Gk, epi: upon + ouranos, the sky, heaven; Chapter 4, §3). Jesus mentions several epigeia: the breaking of birth waters, the materiality of the human body, the sound of the wind and its mysterious unpredictability. Implicit here is the idea that the processes of the whole creation are revelatory. As the gospel proceeds, we will see how the experience of these processes has helped Jesus to discern his role in God’s design for the world and to explain it to his disciples. The fact that epigeia have not quite led Nicodemus to faith is not surprising. As Greek Solomon says, ‘We can hardly guess at what is on earth (Gk, ta epi gēs), and what is at hand we find with labour; but who has traced out what is in the heavens?’ (Wis. 9.16). When Nicodemus reappears later in the narrative he will show more insight. In the meantime, Jesus moves into the more esoteric ‘heavenly things’ and Nicodemus drops out, as dialogue gives way to discourse about heavenly descent and ascent. This scene abounds in contrasts between flesh and spirit, above and below, heavenly and earthly, light and darkness (Jn 3.6, 12, 19, 31). These opposites are often seen as indications that Johannine Christianity was ‘infected’ with Platonic thought. Ecologically minded readers tend to throw up their hands in horror at what they perceive as Johannine dualism, as if the physicality of Earth is being denigrated as somehow inferior to spiritual realities accessible only in another life

10. J. D. G. Dunn, ‘Jesus and the Kingdom: How Would His Message Have Been Heard?’, in Neotestamentica et Philonica: Studies in Honor of Peder Borgen (ed. D. A. Aune, T. Seland and J. H. Ulrichsen; Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 3–36 (33–4). 11. Ashton, ‘Riddles and Mysteries’, p. 340. 12. Ibid., p. 334.

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above and beyond life on Earth. First we should remember that for the Evangelist, the heavens were part of the created kosmos (Chapter 1, §5–§6). Night too was as much a creation of God as day (Isa. 45.7). These contrasts may not actually reflect ‘dualism proper in the religio-historical and phenomenological sense’, but rather dualities drawing on a symbolic interpretation of observable facts in nature, ‘the simple contrasting of good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, and so on [that] is in fact coextensive with religion itself ’.13 Often they facilitate the Evangelist’s use of the literary technique of double entendre. This is not to say that Johannine thought is untouched by the popular Greek philosophy prevalent at the time. It seems though that Hellenistic Judaism was quite capable of absorbing these influences and adapting them to its own worldview. For Philo, for example, Adam moulded from clay, representing human earthliness, was given a spiritual dimension when God breathed life into him (Gen. 2.7; Philo, QG 1.4). Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus invites the readers to learn the ways of God by contemplating one of the on-Earth-things, the wind. Such reflection can be wonderfully informed by the Scriptures where wind is so frequently theophanic (Exod. 15.10; Ps. 18.10; 104.3-4; Chapter 7, §1). The Greek word pneuma used for the wind in Jn 3.8 can also mean ‘spirit’ (as later in the same sentence), so this may well be another Johannine double entendre, perhaps suggestive of the primeval pneuma (Gen. 1.2). The autonomy of the wind/spirit, beyond human understanding or prediction, let alone control, its source and destination a mystery (Jn 3.8), recalls the world of the divine speeches to Job (Job 38.24). Wind is air; it is the breath of life become palpable. Air exists only in that small envelope of atmosphere on which all life on our planet depends. Air ‘co-operates’ wonderfully with the plants of the Earth to become not only breathable, but also aromatic. An early Christian hymn compares the Spirit to the wind moving through a harp causing the strings to speak (Odes Sol. 6.1). The blessings of the messianic age described in 2 Baruch include, along with phenomenal grape yields (Chapter 4, §6), the fragrance of scented plants and trees carried on the wind (2 Bar. 29.7). To think about the wind and its potential to be a messenger of God (Ps. 104.4) is to begin to sense ‘how it is with everyone born of the spirit’ (Jn 3.8).

5. §7 The serpent lifted up in the wilderness (Jn 3.14) The continuing discourse presents a diptych containing two pictures: the bronze serpent that Moses set up on a pole and Jesus himself lifted up on the cross. The strange story about the healing effect when snake-bitten people looked at ‘the serpent of bronze’ (Num. 21.8-9) is quite a change from the bad press that the snake generally gets in the Scriptures (Gen. 3.14-15). The story’s inconsistency

13. S. C. Barton, ‘Johannine Dualism and Contemporary Pluralism’, in The Gospel of John and Christian Theology (ed. R. Bauckham and C. Mosser; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 3–18 (7).

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with the Law forbidding the making of ‘a graven image or any likeness of anything in the earth’ (Exod. 20.4) suggests the influence of beliefs held by numerous ancient Near Eastern societies about the mysterious powers of snakes. Snake venom was an ingredient of medicines – the associated risk being reflected in our word pharmacy (Gk, pharmakon: medicine, poison). There was also the fact that, since the snake regularly shed its old skin to reveal a new one, it represented the alluring possibility of becoming young again, or even of rebirth. For the gospel’s first audience, the snake would have been a familiar symbol of healing. A snake entwined around a staff was the emblem of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. It is still used in our day as the logo of numerous medical institutions. The gospel’s audience would also have been familiar with the temples of Asclepius in the cities of the Mediterranean world. Sick people would go there in search of healing, sometimes sleeping overnight in dormitories where the sacred snakes kept in the sanctuary precinct in honour of the god slithered around them. Returning to Jesus’ diptych, there are similarities. The people who have been bitten by venomous snakes are simply to look at the bronze snake that Moses raised up on a standard and they will live. Johannine believers are to look at Jesus lifted up on the cross – ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced’ (Jn 19.37, citing Zech. 12.10). In Johannine vocabulary, of course, looking has less to do with eyesight than with insight leading to faith. Whoever looks at the crucified Jesus in this way will have ‘eternal life’ (Jn 3.14-16).

5. §8 Eternal Life (Jn 3.16) The term ‘eternal life’ signals a major difference between the two pictures of Jesus’ diptych. For the wilderness generation, to look at the bronze serpent and live meant to recover from snake poisoning and return to living a normal human life, but a life that would eventually end with their death. Jesus explains that he is to be lifted up on the cross so that whoever ‘believes in[to]’ him will have ‘eternal life’. The inverted commas in the previous sentence are there to draw attention to two instances of special Johannine vocabulary. The first, ‘believing in’ (Gk. pisteuō eis, believe into, used in vv. 16, 18, and 36) will be explored when we discuss the Bread of Life Discourse (Chapter 8, §7). We will deal here with the second, ‘eternal life’. This is not normal human life, but neither is it human life that keeps going on and on forever. The special meaning that ‘eternal life’ has in John’s gospel (Gk, zōē: life; Gk, aiōnios: of-the-age; cognate of the Gk aiōn, age, epoch, aeon) is difficult to express in English. One suggested translation, ‘agely life’ goes some way towards conveying the idea of the life of the new age, but it is rather awkward English.14 Earlier in this scene Jesus speaks both of seeing the basileia (3.3) and of entering into it (3.5; Gk, eis: into). The rebirth that Jesus offers will enable people to recognize that the basileia has dawned and

14. Carter, John and Empire, p. 209.

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to become part of it themselves. The ‘hour’ of Jesus will be the sign that God has inaugurated the new era, ‘the resurrection’ (Mk 12.23; Jn 11.25). The people behind the gospel knew that in the world at large it was business as usual, that the dawning of the new aeon had gone unnoticed by the vast majority of people. But they were convinced that their little community could, through their ‘believing into’ Jesus, begin living the life of the newly re-created world. This was not an other-worldly life, but a here-and-now material life. They thought of themselves as having been born again into the life to be lived in the basileia. So ‘eternal life’ was, in effect, their special term for their life on this Earth as believers in Jesus and this was their concept of the basileia. There is also the likelihood that there was an element of countercultural rebuttal of Roman imperial rhetoric in the Johannine circle’s development of its particular understanding of ‘eternal life’. Roman propaganda portraying ‘Eternal Rome’ as beneficent and crediting the Emperor Augustus with bringing in a new era of prosperity and fertility of the Earth would have pervaded the daily lives of the gospel’s intended audience.15 Augustus’s claim to be the bringer of peace on Earth, for example, may well be part of the background to the Johannine Jesus’ gift of peace ‘not as the world gives’ (Jn 14.27). Reading the gospel with attention to the Roman Empire as an ever-present reality that the early Jesus believers had to negotiate can be an important part of an Earth-conscious reading, particularly since Roman economic and military success had ecological implications because of the extent to which it depended on the exploitation of natural resources, and in particular on the destruction of forests.16

5. §9 God so loved the world (Jn 3.16) Conventionally commentators have assumed that ‘the world’ so loved by God is ‘the world of men’.17 From our Earth-conscious perspective, however, it is instructive that Jesus does not say, God loved humankind so much that he gave his only son, but ‘God loved the world so much …’ (Jn 3.16). So the ‘life of the new age’, the life that resonates with God’s intentions for the creation, is not just for human beings; it affects the entire world, the kosmos – to use the Evangelist’s actual word. Kosmos can also mean beauty – the etymology for our word ‘cosmetic’. This is the world that God made (Gk, poiein: make; the etymology for ‘poetry’) in a work of

15. Ibid., pp. 206–7. 16. B. R. Rossing, ‘River of Life in God’s New Jerusalem: An Eschatological Vision for Earth’s Future’, in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans (ed. D. T. Hessel and R. Radford Ruether; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 205–24 (210–12). 17. R. Schnackenberg, The Gospel according to Saint John (3 vols; London: Burns and Oates, 1980), I, p. 398.

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unimaginable artistry (Wis. 9.9).18 ‘God has made everything beautiful in its time’ (LXX Eccl. 3.11). That the world is beauty and poetry, loved into being by the Creator, is the theme of a prayer by Greek Solomon that resonates strikingly with Jn 3.16. For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living. For your immortal spirit is in all things. (Wis. 11.24-12.1)

Given the limitations of first century CE Jewish cosmological knowledge, the known world would have consisted of no more than the land and sea and sky within a certain radius of Jerusalem, its centre. To capture the Israelite sense of ‘the world’ as the totality of the creation, we today would have to think of planet Earth as part of the universe that has its origin in God, that ‘marble’ seen from space, a miniscule dot in the seemingly infinite vistas provided by the Hubble Telescope. The purpose of God’s sending of the Son is the saving/salving of the world (Jn 3.17). We will pick up this thread when discussing Jesus’ declaration that he has come ‘to save the world’ (Jn 12.47; Chapter 12, §7).

5. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) To see our life as a pilgrim path is to recognize with Augustine that the Earth is an inn where we leave ‘the table, cup, pitcher and couch’ for the next travellers (Homilies on John’s Gospel 40.10). Our pilgrim status in the Earth should commit us to travelling light and to bequeathing a habitable Earth home to future generations. However, the distinctively Johannine concept of ‘eternal life’ implies that ‘the holy city’ or ‘the holy land’ is not a remote place to be attained in the future, but the place where we live now (See also Rev. 21.1-3). Christianity is open to the reproach that it has encouraged its adherents to be so focused on a future heavenly home that they neglect Earth, to the detriment of their fellow creatures and with serious implications for intergenerational justice. Perhaps that happened because followers of Jesus did not pay enough attention to the Fourth Gospel! Jesus’ charge that his Father’s house had been turned into an oikos emporiou (Jn 2.16) challenges the way we have made the world into an emporium – a large,

18. J. A. McGuckin, ‘The Beauty of the World and Its Significance in St Gregory the Theologian’, in Towards an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (ed. J. Chryssavgis and B. V. Foltz; New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 34–45 (36).

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ostentatious retailing shop offering a variety of merchandise. We refer to countries as ‘economies’ and to the financial institutions as ‘the city’. ‘The bottom line’ – a metaphor drawn from accountancy – is what influences major decisions that will affect our Earth home. According to the growth model that we have been using, an increase in consumption is the sign of a flourishing economy. But is the retail sector the fundamental determinant of a society’s health? Should we be turning all creatures into commodities to be bought and sold? Would not some of them be more wisely left untouched? Is ‘Gross Domestic Product’ really the measure of a country’s health? After all, ‘GDP values many life-destroying activities positively while many life enhancing ones are kept invisible.’19 If we were, instead, to think of our economy as the housekeeping arrangements for our common home, we would be more creative in developing financial systems that encourage investment in sustainable solutions. As worldwide extreme weather events become more frequent, many areas of the Earth are experiencing abnormally strong winds. The continuing increase in sea surface temperatures that climate scientists are now forecasting will result in increasingly dangerous hurricanes. In the first century CE people did not know where the wind came from (Jn 3.8). Sadly, in our day we do. ‘We are doing this, every time we press on the accelerator or turn up the thermostat or consume something we don’t require.’20 The Evangelist portrays Jesus as someone who listens attentively to the sound of the wind. An emerging field of research today is that of ‘acoustic ecology’, the idea that soundscapes and soundmarks are as important as landscapes and landmarks. Sounds matter; they are integral to our world and therefore require protection. Just as human sounds, such as accents and dialects, and sociocultural sounds, such as church bells or steam trains, should be preserved, we should also be concerned about the sounds that are disappearing from the more-than-human world. This is happening as animals become extinct, as rivers dry up, as birds can no longer follow their normal migratory routes and forests fall silent. The ‘Green Patriarch’, Bartholomew is unequivocal about such ‘sins against creation’. To destroy biological diversity is one of them.21 Jn 3.16 would certainly suggest that believers’ love should be as broad and comprehensive as God’s love for the kosmos. This is where today’s people of faith in Jesus must ask, Is it ‘life to the full’ (Jn 10.10) for God’s beautiful world and for all of God’s children when we see ‘what is happening to our common home’?22

19. M. Hathaway and L. Boff, The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation (New York: Orbis, 2009), p. 32. 20. McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind, pp. 56–7. 21. Cited in Laudato Si’, par. 8. 22. Laudato Si’ pars. 17–61.

Chapter 6 L IVING W ATER

Our principal focus will be on water as we read the story of the Samaritan woman’s encounter with Jesus in an Earth-conscious way. The spiral nature of the gospel’s structure ensures that we can return later to several other significant motifs in this scene. The motif of food (Jn 4.8; 31-34) will come into our discussion of the feeding of the five thousand (6.1-14, 27; Chapter 8, §2–§3). In this scene Jesus insists that his deepest hunger is satisfied by doing God’s work (4.34). We will pick up this thread when reflecting on his riposte, ‘My Father is still working and I also am working’ (5.17; Chapter 7, §5–§6). We will also postpone comment on Jesus’ declaration ‘God is spirit’ (4.24) until the narrative coils round again to the interconnected motifs of water and the Spirit (7.37-39; Chapter 9, §4). Finally we will return to the Samaritans’s recognition of Jesus as ‘the Saviour of the World’ (4.42) when we reach his final summing up of his day’s work ‘to save the world’ (12.47; Chapter 12, §7).

6. §1 He came to a Samaritan city (Jn 4.5) En route from Judea to Galilee, Jesus apparently has to pass through Samaria. It was possible, however, to go by way of the Jordan valley through the gap at Bethshan. Jesus chooses the shorter way, as did many Galilean pilgrims according to Josephus (Ant. 20.6). The scene is set at a well outside the town of Sychar which is likely to be Shechem, about 55 kilometres North of Jerusalem, named for the slope of Mount Gerizim (Heb. shekem: shoulder. See Gen. 48.22) beneath which it nestles. ‘Jacob’s well’ (Gk, pēgē: a spring) would be one of the numerous springs favoured by the geology of the North of the land of Israel, its water, originally precipitated at the ground surface, being filtered downward into the underlying aquifer. The reference to Jacob’s ownership of the well and his bequest of it to his descendants (Jn 4.12) needs to be set within the biblical view of Israel as a land that ‘drinks water by the rain from heaven’ (Deut. 11.11 RSV; Chapter 4, §2). While the sinking of the well – an interference with the natural hydrology essential to sustain human and animal life in this region – and the provision of structural protection for it are attributed to Jacob, the water in it remains the gift of God, a demonstration of the continual divine care for Earth (Ps. 65.9; Jer. 5.24). The well shaft (Gk, phrear:

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the shaft of a well or pit; Jn 4.11-12) excavated from the limestone bedrock would have been at least 30 metres deep. The opening would typically have been about 2.5 metres across, covered by a lid with holes in it for letting down a leather bucket on a rope. The reference to a pitcher (4.28; Gk, hydria: a ceramic or stone container for water, as in 2.6) is implausible. A jar would have been smashed on the stone lining of the shaft. Perhaps the pitcher reflects the experience of the women among the intended audience who would have filled their water jars at an urban fountain or spring house. The Samaritan woman’s eagerness to accept what she hears as an offer of spring water (4.15) is an indication of the effort required to draw up water from a well, a tedious daily task expected of women. Samaria is the territory of Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh inhabited by descendants of those who fell to Assyria in the seventh century BCE, some of whom were deported and returned, many of whom intermarried with the peoples planted there by the Assyrians. Later in the gospel, Jesus will be labelled as a Samaritan – evidently the equivalent of having a demon (Jn 8.48). In keeping with a long history of bitterness (Ezra 4.1-24), the Samaritans were typecast by Judeans as not really Israelite because they tolerated the worship of five foreign gods (2 Kgs 17.29-34; Ant. 9.288). In such a view, whatever worship of the God of Israel went on in Samaria was not only adulterated by idolatry but also inauthentic because it was conducted independently of the Jerusalem temple. Samaria was not genuinely married, therefore, to God, her current ‘husband’. Feminist scholars typically expose the gynophobia and discrimination involved in drawing on all of this to cast the Samaritan woman as a symbol for her people.1 However, there seems to be no way around this reflection in the gospel of the post-exilic centralization of worship in the temple, enforced by Jerusalem’s priestly elite (Chapter 5, §2; Chapter 10, §5). We have seen how the image of Jesus the bridegroom harks back to what we today would regard as a sexist stereotyping of women, endemic in the prophetic writings (Chapter 3, §4). These patriarchal protrusions in the text of the gospel are among the numerous flaws (such as sectarianism and bitterness towards the Jesus’ movement’s parent Judaism) that, as Sandra M. Schneiders suggests, confront us with the ‘not yet’ quality of the new world that the Evangelist seeks to portray.2 Maybe the incorporation of a traditional story into the narrative (Jn 8.3-11) compensates somewhat with its subtle suggestion that adultery is not a solo sin. The unnamed woman is a symbolic figure representing the Samaritans. The setting of the scene at a well is a betrothal topos (Gen. 24.10-61; 29.1-20; Exod. 2.16-22) and the whole incident plays on the courtship/marriage motif. Jesus’ wooing of estranged Samaria is part of the ingathering of all twelve tribes that, as we have

1. L. Schottroff, ‘The Samaritan Woman and the Notion of Sexuality in the Fourth Gospel’, in ‘What is John’ Volume II: Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel (ed. F. F. Segovia; SBL Symposium Series 7; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), pp. 157–81 (159–60). 2. S. M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 197.

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seen, was one facet of the expected restoration of Israel (Chapter 5, §5). For the audience, the scene affirms Samaritan believers as the equals of Jewish believers in the renewed Israel that Jesus is establishing. It also gives us an indication of the esteem in which the leadership of women was held in the Johannine strand of the early Jesus movement, even if some may have found this unsettling (Jn 4.27). Far from dropping out of the scene and leaving the stage to Jesus, as Nicodemus does, this spirited woman engages Jesus in a challenging theological dialogue, on the basis of which she considers herself an apostle, sent to draw others to Jesus. She decisively abandons her water jar to become an effective missionary, bringing her whole town to faith in Jesus as ‘the Saviour of the world’ (4.42).3 The designation ‘apostle’ (Gk, apostolos: one sent with a message, a messenger; derivative of apostellō, send a message) occurs only once in the Fourth Gospel (13.16) and refers not to ‘the twelve’, but to all disciples, women and men, and notably to Mary Magdalene (20.17-18; Chapter 16, §8).

6. §2 Are there not twelve hours of daylight? (Jn 11.9) It is around midday, ‘the sixth hour’, the hottest part of the day. Jesus is weary from travelling, dehydrated by the heat (Jn 4.6). He sits on the well, probably on the stone wall that surrounds it. However, in some manuscripts (P66 and 1201) he sits on the ground (Gk, gē: Earth, land, ground). The Johannine Jesus is often thought to be more divine than human, but this is one example of his participation in the human condition which, ‘though seldom stressed, is consistently taken for granted’.4 In Jesus, God’s creative Word has become flesh (1.14) with all its implications of materiality and interconnectedness with other life on Earth. He shares with all humankind, animals and plants the desperate need for water. As might be expected, there is a deeper level of meaning to the sixth hour. There is an obvious contrast between the woman’s meeting with Jesus openly at high noon and Nicodemus’ coming to him under cover of darkness (3.2). It is also significant that Jesus will again ask for a drink ‘at about the sixth hour’ (19.14). The setting of this scene at ‘the sixth hour’ raises the issue of Johannine time. There are numerous markers of time in the Fourth Gospel: annual, weekly, daily, hourly. They are all based on the rhythms of Earth and, in one case, even on the instinctive response of an animal to these rhythms: the cock that crows as day begins to dawn (Jn 13.38). Some scenes take place at specified times of the day: the tenth hour (1.39 RSV), the sixth hour (4.6 RSV) and the seventh hour (4.52 RSV). As we have seen, the sequence of days in the first chapter (perhaps clearer in an earlier recension) may have been intended to evoke the seven days of creation (Chapter 4, §7). We have also begun to notice how the narrative is entwined around the annual festal calendar of the Jews (Chapter 5, §1). On the basis of

3. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, pp. 186–94. 4. Ashton, ‘The Transformation of Wisdom’, p. 177.

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three references to the Passover Festival (2.13; 6.4; 11.55) the Evangelist intimates that Jesus’ ministry unfolded over a period of about three years. Events happen on various days: ‘the next day’ (1.29), ‘the third day’ (2.1) – possibly an allusion to Jesus’ resurrection seen as fulfilment of Hos. 6.2 (Chapter 4, §7) – ‘the Sabbath’ (Jn 5.9), ‘the first day of the week’ (20.1), to mention just a few examples. However, as Seán Freyne notes, ‘Past and future are repeatedly collapsed into the present of Jesus’ hour.’5 So in this scene, for example, Jesus will say to the Samaritan woman, ‘The hour is coming and is now here’ (4.23). There is, however, a particular time sequence operating simultaneously with the others: the progression of the day’s work that the Father has given the Son to do and that Jesus strives to complete during the twelve hours of daylight (Jn 9.4; 11.9).6 In keeping with ancient notions of time, the Evangelist distinguishes between a twelve-hour day and a twelve-hour night, without taking into account any variation of daylight hours according to season. Jesus’ day, preceded by the lamp-lit night (5.35), dawned with the coming of the light into the world, to which people responded both positively and negatively (3.19-21). His encounter with the Samaritan woman marks the middle of the day (4.6). The next scene where Jesus performs his second sign – healing from his location in Cana an official’s son who lies ill in Capernaum – will take place at the seventh hour (4.52), early afternoon. As evening draws near, his sense of urgency intensifies because night is coming when no one can work (9.4; 11.9; 12.35-36), given the restrictions to human activity in a world without artificial light. As night approaches, Jesus senses that his ‘hour’ – another Johannine unit of symbolic time encompassing Jesus’ death, resurrection, ascension and the giving of the Spirit – is at hand (13.1) and, sure enough, once he himself has set the events of ‘the hour’ in motion, it is indeed a dark night (13.30). The belief that the coming of Jesus into the world fulfils the recurrent prophecies of a coming ‘day’ of God’s definitive action (NRSV, ‘the day of the Lord’, e.g. Isa. 13.9; Ezek. 30.3; Mal 4.5) no doubt underlies this metaphor. However, from an Earth-conscious perspective, the image of Jesus doing his day’s work in the garden of the Earth places him right at the heart of the creation and the processes whereby God sustains it in being. In one of the Psalter’s delightful celebrations of the creation, human work is seen as integral to these processes. At sunrise, as the nocturnal animals withdraw to rest in their dens, humans go out to do their work until the evening (Ps. 104.22-23). In view of the betrothal atmosphere of this Samaritan scene and recalling John’s joyful recognition of Jesus as the bridegroom (Jn 3.29), we might also note that the journey of the light – coming out of the

5. S. Freyne, ‘In Search of Identity: Narrativity, Discipleship and Moral Agency’, in Moral Language in the New Testament: The Interrelatedness of Language and Ethics in early Christian Writings (ed. R. Zimmermann and J. G. van der Watt: Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), pp. 67–85 (77). 6. M. Gourges, ‘The Superimposition of Symbolic Time and Real Time in the Gospel of John: The Symbolism of Light as Time Marker’, PIBA 31 (2009), pp. 54–65.

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heavens to dawn in the world and returning there having completed his work (Jn 3.13; 6.62; 8.12) – is distinctly reminiscent of another biblical celebration of the progression of a day from morning to evening. In the heavens [God] has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them; and nothing is hid from its heat. (Ps. 19.4-6)

Whatever discomfort we may feel with the underlying implication of sexual conquest, we can still appreciate how well the alacrity and exuberance implied in the metaphor fits with the Johannine Jesus’ eagerness to do his Father’s work (Jn 4.34) and his joy in its completion (15.11; 17.3). We will return to the unfolding of Jesus’ ministry as a day’s work when we reach Bethzatha and hear his retort to the accusation of breaking the Sabbath, ‘My Father is still working, and I also am working’ (Jn 5.17; Chapter 7, §4).

6. §3 If you knew the gift of God (Jn 4.10) For our Earth-conscious reading, it is important to focus on the Earth element that figures so prominently in this scene: water. According to the Scriptures, water is provided by God, the Creator and ‘hands-on’ sustainer of life, who knows when the land needs water (Isa. 44.3). The divine initiative in the seasonal cycles on which all life depends for survival is praised in a psalmist’s delightful anthropomorphisms. You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth. (Ps. 65.9-10)

Obviously, we do not share the pre-scientific world view of the ancient Israelites, but we can still appreciate their poetry and learn from their consciousness of water, and the life that it makes possible, as a divine gift. In the biblical tradition, copiously flowing water is a privileged metaphor for God’s self-donation or self-communication to humankind, whether expressed as Spirit, Word, Wisdom or Law. In the Scriptures and in Jewish writings of the late Second Temple period, water most frequently symbolizes abundant life in

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both the present age and the age to come.7 The antithesis of this symbolism is found in the Psalms of Solomon where life in Israel under Roman Rule is a time of drought ‘when the heavens withheld rain from falling on the earth and springs were stopped: from the perennial [springs] far underground [to] those in the high mountains’ (PsSol. 17.18-19). It is from this situation that Psalm of Solomon 17 pleads with God to raise up the Son of David, the Messiah. And as the following psalm insists, the God who sends the Messiah is that hands-on Creator who decides on the precise orbits of the stars and the timing of their movements in the heavens (PsSol. 18.10-12).8 Awareness of Israel’s habitat and climate can help us to appreciate how the Creator’s outpouring of water on thirsty soil could be such a potent symbol of the life-enhancing blessing that comes with the divine self-disclosure. Jeremiah contrasts this inexhaustible ‘fountain of living water’ with a leaky cistern holding stagnant water that may well be contaminated and that will inevitably run dry (Jer. 2.13; 17.13). Joel’s and Ezekiel’s imagery in which the lavishness of God’s gift of the spirit is compared to water poured out with generous abandon (Joel 2.28-29; Ezek. 39.29) would have had a dramatic impact in a culture where the storage and careful management of water was a matter of life and death. For Ben Sira, divine Wisdom is water always to be thirsted for (Sir. 24.21) and the Law is an overflowing paradisial river (24.23-27). Finally, as we have seen, it is from the temple in Jerusalem, where God dwells, that the waters of life were believed to flow out into the Earth (Ezek. 47.9, 12; Chapter 1, §4). To understand what Jesus’ offer of ‘a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (Jn 4.14 RSV) might have meant to the gospel’s intended audience, we need to enter imaginatively into the story world’s climate and terrain, and into the story’s characters and their way of life, whether agrarian or urban. For the people of the ‘story world’, whose access to water depended on intermittent precipitation, local runoff and small-scale exploitation of rain-fed aquifers, a gushing spring was something special. Josephus, for example, sang the praises of the ‘sweet and fruitful’ water in the Lake of Tiberias and the wholesome waters of a fountain at Jericho, made sweet by Elisha, noting that if the water were drawn up before sunrise it would be refreshingly cold (J.W. 4.456, 472). He describes water sources in hills that look like breasts (7.189). The author of 1 Clement, a work that almost made it into the New Testament, writes of water as one of the greatest of the Creator’s gifts. ‘The ever-flowing fountains, formed both for enjoyment and health, furnish without fail their breasts for the life of humankind’ (1 Clem. 20). Philo makes a similar comparison. Earth is a mother from whose breasts flow rivers and springs (Creation, 38.133). Believers in Jesus from a Gentile background would have been conditioned to see water as a gift of the gods, a belief reinforced every time city dwellers went to collect water and encountered the sculptures of deities that were routinely

7. For numerous examples, see S. T. Um, The Theme of Temple Christology in John’s Gospel (London: T&T Clark, 2006), pp. 15–67, 133. 8. OTP II, pp. 666; 669–70.

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incorporated into the design of fountains and spring houses, making them into shrines. These urban water supplies were often tremendous feats of engineering, bringing water in long conduits through various levels to increase the pressure and through aerating chambers to simulate natural springs. All of this impressed on a city’s inhabitants that water was the gift of Rome and its gods. It is quite possible that there is an element of challenge to all this in the Johannine presentation of Jesus as the source of ‘living water’.

6. §4 Bread from heaven and water from the rock (Neh. 9.15) Since in the Fourth Gospel Jesus also refers to himself as the living bread (Jn 6.51), we need to pair water with bread. The intended audience had inherited a biblical tradition where bread and water are ‘stay and staff ’ (Isa. 3.1 RSV), a basic and satisfying staple diet (Deut. 23.4; 1 Sam. 30.11; Prov. 25.21). In that tradition, to fast is to eat neither bread nor water (Exod. 34.28; Ezra 10.6); to be safe is to be assured of bread and water (Isa. 33.16); to experience a time of crisis is to receive ‘the bread of adversity and the water of affliction’ (Isa. 30.20); to live under threat is to ‘eat [one’s] bread with fearfulness, and drink [one’s] water in dismay’ (Ezek. 12.19). For Israel, bread and water had a special status as the food and drink that God had provided during the desert journey – ‘bread from heaven’ for their hunger and ‘water out of the rock’ for their thirst (Ps. 78.19-25; Neh. 9.15). Twenty-firstcentury Europeans are culturally conditioned to think of a meal of bread and water as meagre and even as penitential. An appeal made by Caritas Jerusalem on behalf of the people of the Gaza Strip – ‘We need bread and water.’9 – can remind us of the privileged location from which we make such an assumption. In the Greco-Roman world where Christianity emerged, a meal of bread and water was quite normal and acceptable. For the vast majority of people, wine drinking was relatively rare. Even people who might describe themselves as drinking wine were actually drinking mostly water sweetened with (often very little) wine. Wine was always watered down, as the produce of ancient ‘wineries’ was rough, by our standards. Even at a banquet in a Greco-Roman villa, the wine would be carefully measured out – in various glass sizes and strengths to distinguish in honour among the host’s friends, clients and freed slaves: three, four or five parts water to one part wine (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 2.6). Given what we know of the socio-economic profile of the early Jesus movement, there would have been many situations where water, rather than wine, was drunk when Christians gathered at the meal that would eventually be known as the Eucharist. The Johannine symbolism associated with water has conventionally been linked with baptism. The instruction in the Didachē that baptism should be performed in ‘living water’ is often cited in support of this (Did. 7.2). However, Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman about water to drink.

9. R. Mickens, ‘Where Death Stalks the Starving’, in The Tablet, 15 July 2006, p. 11.

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We know of ritual water drinking as part of Christian initiation from The Apostolic Tradition (21.31-37), but there was also what liturgists call ‘the bread and water eucharist’ that, as a major study has recently shown, was practised in several mainstream strands of the early Jesus movement.10 A decision to refuse wine and to drink only water was generally a religiously motivated choice. Even though the Jews blessed God, Creator of the vine, for the gift of ‘wine to gladden the human heart’ (Ps. 104.15), there were those who avoided wine for various reasons: as part of an ascetic lifestyle (Lev. 10.9; Lk. 1.15), because of its idolatrous associations (Rom. 14.21) or in mourning for the destruction of the temple (t. Sotah 15.9-15).11 An ascetic preference for water was not confined to Judaism. In certain schools of Hellenistic philosophical thought, a diet without meat and wine was recommended as a return to a golden age of harmony with nature. According to philosophies such as Cynicism, limiting oneself to plain food and to water, the pure and natural drink, demonstrated one’s self-control and superiority to the decadent who indulged in luxury. It is quite possible that Gentile converts of this persuasion could have found in their Christian belief reason to continue in such asceticism, especially if they were Johannine believers who understood their enjoyment of the ‘eternal life’ that Jesus brings as a return to Eden. In the early centuries of Christianity there continued to be quite a few Christians who avoided wine drinking at the Eucharist, in particular the Encratites and the Ebionites whose eucharistic water drinking is roundly condemned by Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. 1.28.1; 5.1.3). The patristic evidence generally gives the impression that such groups were regarded as heretical.

6. §5 To drink of the water that Jesus gives (Jn 4.14) There is, however, an intriguing exception: Letter 63 of Cyprian of Carthage – dated around 250 CE and thus pre-dating our oldest complete manuscripts of the Fourth Gospel – to Caecilius of Biltha. Cyprian wrote to discourage him from using water, rather than a mixture of water and wine, in the eucharistic cup. What is fascinating about this letter is that Cyprian is addressing a fellow bishop in good standing, not a member of some heterodox group. The practice of eucharistic water drinking was clearly widespread and mainstream in mid-third-century North Africa. We gather from Cyprian that its proponents’ defence of this practice showed them to be quintessentially Johannine believers. Reading the letter against the grain, we can reconstruct the arguments that Cyprian is trying to counter. It seems that when those North African believers in Jesus drank water at their Eucharist they saw themselves as drinking from the spring of living water offered to the Samaritan woman (Jn 4.10), as

10. A. McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Meals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 11. P. Alexander, ‘What Happened to the Priesthood after 70?’, in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne (ed. Z. Rodgers, M. Daly-Denton and A. FitzpatrickMcKinley ; Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 5–33 (21).

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slaking their thirst from the ‘rivers of living water’ promised at the Feast of Tabernacles (7.37-39), and as ingesting the water flowing from the uplifted Jesus’ side (19.34).12 All of this has implications for a reading of the Fourth Gospel that aims to be conscious of the Earth, over 70 per cent of whose surface is covered in water. The motif of water runs like ‘a silver thread’ through the gospel.13 Water is found in jars at Cana; as a symbol of rebirth; for baptism by John, Jesus and the disciples; in a well in Samaria; in the Pool of Bethzatha; in the ‘Sea of Galilee’; in the pool of Siloam; in a basin for washing the disciples’ feet. Moreover, the significance of water ‘expands as the narrative unfolds’, climaxing in the waters gushing from the crucified Jesus’ pierced side, something phenomenal that the Evangelist makes such a point of recording (19.34-35).14 While there is probably no commentator who does not regard Jesus’ provision of bread (6.1-14) as in some way connected with the Eucharist – even if most conveniently forget about the fish (6.9), in spite of Jn 21.9 – a similar linkage of Jesus’ gift of water with the Eucharist is unusual. Even an entire monograph devoted to the Johannine handling of water, when addressing the topic of ‘sacramentalism’, touches only on baptism.15 The suggestion that Johannine water texts provided the rationale for the eucharistic water drinkers addressed by Cyprian raises the question whether the drinking of water may have been part of the regular experience of early Johannine believers at the Eucharist. Supposing that it was, how might Jesus’ offer of ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’ (4.14), his promise of ‘rivers of living water’ (7.38) and the flow of water from the pierced side (19.34) of ‘the temple of his body’ (2.21) have registered with such an audience? It would seem that the earliest recipients of the Fourth Gospel had what later Christian theology would call a profoundly sacramental view of water. For them, to drink water at their community meal was to receive Jesus’ gift of ‘living water’, to find their deepest thirst quenched, to be inundated with the gift of the Spirit. This rich symbolic interpretation of the act of water drinking was possible because their bodily experience of water as essential to life was informed by the biblical traditions that we have sketched out in this chapter.16 They experienced water as one of the epigeia, the ‘on-Earth-things’ (3.12;

12. G. F. Diercks (ed.), Sancti Cypriani Episcopi Epistularium. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina III c (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), pp. 389–417. 13. Lightfoot. Saint John’s Gospel, p. 121. 14. R. A. Culpepper, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), pp. 192–5. 15. L. P. Jones. The Symbol of Water in the Gospel of John (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 231–2. 16. For the bread and water Eucharist in Johannine circles, see M. Daly-Denton, ‘To Hear what Water is Saying to the Churches’, Water: A Matter of Life and Death; Interface 14 (2011), pp. 111–25; ‘Drinking the Water that Jesus Gives: A Johannine Eucharistic Symbol?’, in A Wandering Galilean (see footnote 11 above), pp. 345–65; ‘Water in the Eucharistic Cup: A Feature of the Eucharist in Johannine Trajectories through Early Christianity’, ITQ 72 (2007), pp. 356–70.

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Chapter 5, §6). It was because they regarded water as ‘the gift of God’ (4.10) that they were able to understand how Jesus could give them ‘living water’.

6. §6 The water that had become wine (Jn 2.9) When we think of the eucharistic water drinkers among the earliest Johannine Christians, the story of Jesus changing water into wine at Cana (Jn 2.1-11) immediately raises a question. What would the Cana wedding story have said to these people? Perhaps it encouraged a subsequent generation of Johannine believers to abandon their earlier practice of using water only in the eucharistic cup and to adopt the by-then more widely established practice of using wine. There seems to be a similar intent behind the redactional eucharistic insertion to the Bread of Life discourse (6.51c-58. Chapter 8, §9).The Cana story would certainly have reassured those hesitant about the appropriateness of drinking wine at the community meal that when Jesus is there with his disciples (2.2), it is a wedding, so there should be festive wine. Such reasoning would draw on an alternative biblically based rationale. Jewish believers in Jesus who were repulsed by the idea of drinking wine as Jesus’ blood (6.55) might have found eucharistic wine drinking more acceptable if they could think of the wine as the enjoyment here-and-now of the fine, wellstrained quality wines of the eschatological wedding feast (Isa. 25.6). Alternatively, does the Cana story perhaps tell of the experience of some Johannine Christians at the Eucharist? Because of their socio-economic circumstances they have only water to drink, but because of Jesus’ work, ‘the world is a wedding’.17 So a frugal meal becomes a banquet where the water becomes ‘the good wine’ (2.10). We find ample confirmation of a symbolic understanding of water drinking such as this in the broader range of Johannine writings. In the Book of Revelation, wine is consistently associated with wrath or used as an image of fornication (Rev. 17.2) or of decadence and luxury based on oppression and injustice (18.3). Clear, refreshing water, however, is the drink enjoyed at a heavenly liturgy, a great Feast of Tabernacles, in fact. The Lamb, who is also their shepherd, guides the saints to springs of living water (7.17). Echoing Isaiah 55, as in Jn 7.38, the glorified Jesus declares, ‘To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life’ (Rev. 21.6). The seer is shown ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb’ (22.1) and all who are thirsty are invited to come and ‘take the water of life as a gift’ (22.17). This concluding invitation has such ‘an unmistakably liturgical ring’ to it that it is difficult to exclude the possibility that it reflects the author’s and implied audience’s ritual, and even eucharistic, experience.18

17. A. M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). The title cites Scott, Negative Capability, p. 99. 18. G. B. Caird, The Revelation of Saint John the Divine (London: A. & C. Black, 1966), pp. 286–7.

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6. §7 The one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps (Amos 9.13) Finally, as Earth-conscious readers we cannot take our leave of Samaria without responding to the Johannine Jesus’ command, ‘Look around you and see!’ (Jn 4.35). This is an invitation to learn something by observing the creation and its processes, its ‘way’. Here Jesus refers to fields white with the promise of harvest. The ingathering of crops is always a cause for celebration (Deut. 16.13-15). The festivity of harvest time (Isa. 9.3; Ps. 126.5), like ‘the voice of the bridegroom’ (Chapter 3, §4), is one of the sounds that disappear from the land at times of affliction (Isa. 16.9-10; Joel 1.1-12). The harvest metaphor frequently underlies biblical references to God’s ingathering of dispersed Israel (Isa. 11.12; 43.5-6). In this Johannine scene it highlights the inclusion of the Samaritans in the renewed Israel. The idea of the crops being ripe four months ahead of the expected time so that the sowing and reaping are simultaneous brings scriptural harvest imagery to a new level. This is a far cry from the realities of Palestinian drought farming. Israel’s climate is such that, while sunshine is generally assured, the yield of crops depends critically on unpredictable seasonal rains (Lev. 26.4). Lack of rain means a poor harvest. Not only is the rainfall meagre … but it is unevenly distributed in space and time, and the total amount that actually falls in a given area can vary dramatically from year to year. This precipitation arrives during the cooler months, so there is no cloud cover or new moisture to moderate the strength of the summer sun. In consequence, the rates of evapo-transpiration are very high. Because of the low levels of precipitation, the protective cover of vegetation in the Middle East is thin and difficult to replace once damaged. The soil, often light and lacking an absorbent cover of humus, is then soon washed away by the winter rain, which, when it comes, tends to fall in short, intense storms.19

Amos wrote of days to come ‘when the one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed’ (Amos 9.13-14), but what Jesus says here surpasses even that. Jesus has just spoken of accomplishing (Gk. teleioō: fulfil, bring to completion; also used in Jn 19.30) the work God has sent  him to do. For an audience who knows the Scriptures, the echo is loud and clear. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isa. 55.10-11)

19. Oleson, ‘Water Works’, p. 883.

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These Samaritan fields are the extraordinary realization of Deuteronomy’s vision of Israel as ‘a land that drinks water by the rain from heaven’, and because of this continual expression of the divine care is astonishingly productive (Deut. 11.10-12 RSV). In Jesus, the Word sent from God has watered the Earth. In fact, the Word runs so swiftly (Ps 147.15 [LXX 147.4]) and with such alacrity that the seasonal rhythms of Earth are accelerated to a point where ordinary times and seasons converge into the one moment of completion and fulfilment. The saying, ‘I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour’ (Jn 4.38), has much in common with the Markan Jesus’ parable comparing the basileia to the way seeds mysteriously sprout and grow while the farmer sleeps (Mk 4.26-29). Again the disciples are challenged by the epigeia – the ‘way’ of things on Earth: that without any human intervention the divine watering satisfies the thirsty ground, enabling the crops to grow (Ps. 104.13-14). Later in the gospel Jesus will develop this theme from another angle: the death and burial of the grain that is the precondition for the harvest (Jn 12.24; Chapter 12, §2).

6. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) When Jesus sat down to rest he may well have been at risk of what we today call heat exhaustion. In recent decades, heatwaves have caused significant mortality worldwide, even in temperate regions of the world. Jesus needed help to get a drink of water. As the impact of climate change intensifies, more and more people will need help to cope with heat stress. It cannot be the ‘life to the full’ that the Creator intends (Jn 10.10) when deaths from heat stroke are entirely preventable. The ‘work of God’ in this context is firstly whatever we can do towards mitigating climate change. In terms of adaptation, this work might include putting pressure on our governments to improve urban planning and architecture, energy and transport policies, health system preparedness. However, a recent statement from the EuroHEAT project specifically mentions something that everyone can do: ‘helping others’.20 Today’s believers in Jesus inhabit a world where 650 million people do not have safe drinking water. One in three of the Earth’s population does not have access to the water that is necessary for adequate sanitation and hygiene. It is estimated that 900 children die every day of diarrhoeal diseases caused by unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation.21 The Samaritan woman reminds us that ‘women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water’.22 Luise Schottroff suggests that the Samaritan woman’s arrival at the well at midday indicates that

20. ‘Impacts of Europe’s changing climate – 2008 indicator-based assessment’, 5.10.2. p. 152. http://www.eea.europa.eu/ (accessed 18 January 2016). 21. Data from Water Aid, www.wateraid.org (accessed 15 December 2015). 22. Dublin Principle 3 from the Declaration of the International Conference on Water and the Environment, Dublin, Ireland, 26–31 January 1992.

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she had to make several trips there each day to draw water for livestock, bathing, washing dishes, laundering and for crafts requiring water.23 Many women today have to walk such long distances to collect a bucket of water that they cannot go more than once a day. Frequently the only water they can find is polluted, so a mother often has no choice but to give unsafe water to her children knowing that it will make them ill. Fresh water is a finite resource. We are now hearing about ‘peak water’ – that there are regions where water use exceeds the amount that is naturally replenished through the Earth’s finely tuned hydrological cycle. To add to this, climate change is seriously disturbing this cycle. We have moved from seeing water as a gift, as part of the commons, to thinking in terms of ownership of water resources. In some places water has become a commodity with which to maximize profit, regardless of the impact on the hydrological cycle. It is often frittered away inappropriately: to water deserts, for example, to irrigate exotic cash crops, or to be bottled and transported across the globe to places that do not need it. We even presume now to take water from the aquifers that actually belong to other earthkind and to future generations. The management of urban water supplies is increasingly privatized, sometimes being run by transnational corporations, answerable to no one. Water has become so profitable that water utilities are recommended to investors. Where rivers are shared by more than one state or where rivers on which countries depend rise in other countries, tensions over water rights and water quality are inevitable. Water issues now threaten to become the major cause of war in our world. Believers in Jesus cannot forget the planetary water crisis when they contemplate the water in a well-designed baptismal font – especially one that features ‘living water’, when they hear the music of flowing water’s ‘voice’, when they dip their hand into water’s coolness to recall their baptism. How even more powerfully, though, might they be affected if they could imagine a eucharistic experience where the drinking of clear, fresh water was a symbolic enactment of that acceptance of Jesus in faith that is presented in the Fourth Gospel as drinking deep from ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’ (Jn 4.14)? There is nothing stopping us from thinking of this any time we enjoy a glass of water. Such mindfulness might attune us to ‘what the Spirit is saying to the churches’ (Rev. 2.7) about that endangered Earth element on which all life depends. It might open up new perspectives on the mystery and sacredness of water. To see water as the ‘gift of God’ (Jn 4.10) is to have a vision of our world as a disclosure of God through visible, audible, fragrant, tangible, edible and potable signs. Could such a vision galvanize us into action to remedy the global scarcity of safe drinking water?

23. Schottroff, ‘The Samaritan Woman’, p. 165.

Chapter 7 M Y F ATHER H AS N EVER C EASED W ORKING

The major preoccupation of this chapter is the Johannine portrayal of Jesus as the son of God who is continually doing God’s work in the world. And since ‘it is parentally, in kindness and unswerving care, that God’s work is done’,1 this is also a good moment in our reading to consider Jesus’ use of the title ‘Father’ for God.

7. §1 A pool called Bethzatha (Jn 5.2) The opening note on which Chapter 5 of the gospel begins is again pilgrimage (Chapter 5, §1). Jesus is in Jerusalem for one of the three pilgrim festivals (Exod. 23.14-17). He goes north east of the temple mount to a part of the city that Josephus calls ‘the Bezetha’ (J.W. 5.4.2) where there is a reservoir. There is confusion in the ancient gospel manuscripts about the name of this pool, whether Bethsaida (probably a scribal assimilation to Jn 1.44), Bethesda (Aram., Bet h․esda: House of Mercy, a possible reference to the healings believed to occur there; Heb. Beth Eshda: place of flowing), or Bethzatha (similar to ‘the Bezetha’).2 Archaeological excavations in this area have revealed a rectangular double pool and the remains of the columns that supported the roofs covering in the walkways surrounding it on all four sides, with a fifth portico separating the two pools. The reservoir’s location ‘near the Sheep Gate’ – a gate in the city walls unknown to us, but mentioned in Neh. 3.1 – suggests that the pool may have provided water for livestock. According to the Evangelist, Bethzatha was a place where invalids lay around a pool hoping for a cure if they could succeed in being the first to immerse themselves as soon as there was movement in the waters. According to verses 3b-4, an insertion found in some ancient authorities, they were ‘waiting for the moving of the water, for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and troubled the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had’. This annotation, an example of early commentary on the story, alerts us to that Israelite sense of wonder at the

1. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 50. 2. J. F. Strange, ‘Beth-Zatha’, in ABD I, pp. 700–1.

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phenomenon of the wind (Chapter 5, §6) gusting over a body of water, just as in the beginning, ‘a wind from God swept over the face of the waters’ (Gen. 1.2). It was a wind sent by God that caused the flood waters to subside (Gen. 8.1). At the Exodus, as the east wind drove back the Red Sea (Exod. 14.21), God set a path through the raging waters, yet with no trace of footprints (Ps. 77.19). It would seem that the wind stirring the ‘bronze sea’ in the temple courts was regarded as a representation of the coming of God ‘on the wings of the wind’ (Ps. 104.3).3 The blind, lame and paralysed people by the pool hope for such a theophany.

7. §2 The Son gives life to whomever he wishes (Jn 5.21) The NRSV ‘invalids’ (Jn 5.3) translates the present participle of the verb astheneō, forms and cognates of which are used in all Johannine references to sickness. The noun astheneia, usually translated illness, actually means ‘a lack of strength’. It therefore denotes weakness, debility, feebleness. Because of the prevalent link between illness and social exclusion in the ancient world, astheneia can also imply neediness, social insignificance or poverty, all conditions that result in marginalization. In the Septuagint astheneia and its cognates frequently occur in parallel with words describing poor people (e.g. penēta, ptōchos) and are sometimes used to translate the Hebrew ani (poor).4 Poverty would seem to be the condition of the man lying there with no one to help him reach the curative pool, perhaps hoping for no more than a few coins from pilgrims passing through Bethzatha, such as the group of Jesus followers who kept a common fund for giving to the needy (Jn 12.5-6; 13.29). In the Fourth Gospel, illness is never attributed to evil spirits. Rather astheneia is the diminishment of life, the polar opposite to zoē, the flourishing of life. In his second sign, Jesus has said to the official who begged him to heal his son’s astheneia (Jn 4.46), ‘Your son will live’ (4.50). Later he will call Lazarus out of his fatal astheneia (11.1) to life. Here at Bethzatha Jesus tells the man to stand up (Gk, egeire: stand up, rise), to adopt the vigorous posture of the living, a dramatic contrast with his previous restriction to the recumbent position of the dead. Immediately the man becomes healthy (Gk, hygiēs: whole, healthy, well; used in vv. 9, 11, 14, 15) and capable of taking up his mat and walking. Later Jesus will explain the deeper meaning of rising. ‘Just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wishes’ (5.21). Thirty-eight – the number of years that the man had been ill is no random number. Deut. 2.14 records that it took thirty-eight years for the Israelites to reach the Wadi Zered (Wadi-el-Hesa at the southern end of the Dead Sea), a significant border crossing that marked the final phase of their journey to the Promised Land. All of this time ‘they ate

3. Lanfer, Remembering Eden, p. 130. 4. R. J. Karris, Jesus and the Marginalized in John’s Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 1990), pp. 44–5.

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manna, until they came to the border of the land of Canaan’ (Exod. 16.35). By then the generation that had left Egypt had died (Deut. 2.14). In the next scene of the gospel, Jesus will contrast Israel’s ancestors who ate the manna in the wilderness, and died with those who receive him as ‘the true bread from heaven’ and live (Jn 6.32; 48-51).

7. §3 He was calling God his own Father (Jn 5.18) Jesus’ reference to God as ‘the Father’ (Jn 5.20-23) provides an opportunity for us to explore this term in Earth-conscious mode. So far in the gospel we have heard that the glory of the Word become flesh is that of ‘a father’s only son’ (1.14) who reclines in the Father’s bosom (1.18). Jesus’ tirade in the temple included a reference to it as his Father’s house (2.16). He has told Nicodemus, ‘The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands’ (3.35). To the Samaritan woman he has spoken of the Father who seeks true worshippers (4.21-23). Here at Bethzatha, when accused of infringement of the Sabbath, because he directed a man to carry a burden (Neh. 13.19; Jer. 17.19-27), Jesus replies, ‘My Father is still working and I also am working’ (Jn 5.17) and the Evangelist explains to the audience that the hostility towards Jesus was not just because of his tendency towards ‘loose’ interpretation of Sabbath regulations (5.18; NRSV: ‘breaking the Sabbath’; Gk., luō, loosen, used here in the imperfect tense). The Judeans kept persecuting (imperfect tense) Jesus and threatening to kill him because of his habit of calling (imperfect tense again) God his Father which they heard as a man making himself equal with God (5.16-18). The Fourth Gospel, undoubtedly following the memory of Jesus’ own practice, refers to God as Father 120 times. This compares impressively with the fortyfour occurrences in Matthew, seventeen in Luke and four in Mark. With our contemporary feminist consciousness, this imaging of God in terms of a gendered societal role is problematic. We can simply accept that it underscores our cultural distance from the world out of which the Fourth Gospel emerged. We can also tap into biblical imagery for God that is suggestive of motherhood and that therefore mitigates the patriarchal resonances of the divine ‘fatherhood’: the comparison of the divine compassion with the care of mother birds for their young (Exod. 19.4; Deut. 32.11; Ps. 91.4), with the inability of a mother ever to forget her child (Isa 49.15), with the tenderness a mother feels for the child of her womb (Heb., rah․amîm, compassion, the emotions, the womb; Hos. 11.8; see 1 Kgs 3.26).5 We can also take comfort from the inadequacy of any analogy for God because it must elicit both affirmation and negation. To say that God is a father is to call on our human experience of fatherhood, but at the same time to disallow that God

5. On the ‘womb-compassion’ of God, see V. M. Lawson, The Blessing of Mercy: Bible Perspectives and Ecological Challenges (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), pp. 32–7.

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is anything like a human father. However, there is real benefit for us, as Earthconscious readers, in grasping the fatherhood ‘nettle’. Seán Freyne explains that calling God Father ‘needs to be understood in the context of Jesus’ own situation where the notion of kinship is central to his understanding of his community. The role of father is that of provider of the necessities of life, thus making it a suitable image for God as creator and sustainer of all life.’6 In fact, the Johannine Jesus’ reference to the temple as his ‘Father’s house’ recalls ‘the basic unit of ancient Israel’s system of land tenure’ (Heb., Bêt‘ab: father’s house) the ‘inheritance’ of inalienable land that ensured the economic viability of a family.7 One’s ‘father’s house’ was much more than a building. It was what would still be called in rural Ireland ‘the home place’ that gives people their sense of belonging in the world and shapes their identity (Gen. 20.13; Ps. 45.10). The temple represented God’s desire to have such a ‘dwelling place’ (Ps. 84.1) among earthkind. Jesus called it ‘my Father’s house’ (Jn 2.16; Chapter 5, §3). It spoke to him of his mission in the world: to be the ‘home place’ where God lived at the centre of the creation (1.14). As we will see, the Fourth Gospel picks up these themes later when speaking of the mutual home making of the Father and the disciples (Jn 14.2, 23. Chapter 13, §6). The ancient Israelite circles of kinship – the nation, the tribe, the clan, the house – were still significant in Jesus’ time, even as territorial identities. In the past, all of these lines of kinship had converged on the kingship, long since defunct, but very much alive in the first century CE as memory and as hope. In fact, the intended audience for the gospel may well have heard Jesus’ references to ‘the Father’ as a slight on Rome’s pretensions to kingship over Israel with its propaganda claiming that a supposedly benign emperor was father, not only of the fatherland, but of the whole human race. The Israelite royal ideal of fatherly provision through just administration (Isa. 9.6; 22.21) most definitely shaped the perception of God as Creator and generously providing Sustainer (Ps. 68.5). It is clear from the biblical tradition that the image of beneficent kingship was central to Israel’s learning to name the divine Creator/Sustainer as Father. ‘Have we not all one father?’ asks the prophet Malachi. ‘Has not one God created us?’ (Mal. 2.10) For Jeremiah, the ultimate idolatry is to say to anything other than God, ‘You are my father; you gave me birth’ (Jer. 2.27). According to Isaiah, we creatures are the clay, and ‘our father’ is the potter who fashions us by hand (Isa. 64.8). The ‘we’ here is not just humankind; the whole creation is equally the work of God’s hands (Ps. 102.25; 138.8). Commenting on the earliest confessions of Christian faith in God as Father, Nicholas Lash asks, ‘Father of what, or whom, is God confessed to be? Second-century Christians would, for the most part, have answered: of all of us and all the world. Thus Tatian, writing only some sixty or seventy years after the completion of the Fourth Gospel, speaks of God as “Father of things tangible

6. Freyne, Jesus, a Jewish Galilean, p. 38. 7. C. G. H. Wright, ‘Family’, in ABD II, pp. 761–9 (763–4).

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and things unseen”.’8 In thinking of the creation as God’s ‘child’, we should also keep in mind that in the ancient world ignorance of the biology and genetics of procreation led people to assume that the male is the sole source of a new human life. A father was, therefore, understood to be a life-giver, especially since the process of gestation and birth was regarded as something initiated ‘by the will of a man’ (Jn 1.13). The Johannine understanding of God as ‘Father’, therefore, arises from the concept of the world’s createdness. God makes and sustains the world parentally.

7. §4 The Son does only what he sees the Father doing (Jn 5.19) In our discussion of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman, we noted in passing his refusal of the disciples’ invitation to eat: ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work’ (Jn 4.34; Chapter 6, §2). The Bethzatha scene develops the theme of Jesus’ work further in his riposte to the accusation of infringement of the Sabbath rest, ‘My Father is still working and I also am at work’ (5.17). Behind this is the Israelite view of creation, not as a ‘once off ’ event, but as an ongoing divine activity, a continually overflowing ‘fountain of life’ (Ps. 36.8-9), a holding of everything in cherished being. To borrow an analogy from Elizabeth A. Johnson and from Herbert McCabe from whom she herself borrows, ‘Creation is a performance art.’9 ‘God makes all things and keeps them in existence from moment to moment, not like a sculptor who makes a statue and leaves it alone, but like a singer who keeps her song in existence at all times.’10 To borrow again, this time from John Le Carré, God is ‘The Constant Gardener’.11 Jesus’ reply shows awareness of this concept of the constantly creating God and, in particular, of rabbinical discussions on how the world could continue to exist if God were really to rest on the Sabbath (e.g. Mek. Šabb. 2.25; Gen. Rab. 11.5).12 In the rabbinic corpus the attribution of opinions to first-century rabbis is notoriously open to the suspicion of being a device intended to impart an aura of authority. However, the gospels, as first century CE Jewish writings, can often confirm the long lineage of a rabbinical interpretation of a scriptural passage, even if it did not find written expression until several centuries into the Common Era. In this case, the hermeneutical debate concerns God’s work of creation (Gen. 2.1-2; LXX, ta erga, the works), the work of completing (LXX, teleō) the

8. Tatian, Oratio adversus Graecos, 6.813, as cited in Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 34. 9. E. A. Johnson, ‘Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love’, in ITQ 80 (2015), pp. 283–93 (285). 10. H. McCabe, God, Christ and Us (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 103. Cited in E. A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 123. 11. J. Le Carré, The Constant Gardener: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2001). 12. For further examples, see M. H. Burer, Divine Sabbath Work (Winona Lake, IN, Eisenbrauns, 2012), pp. 84–100.

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heavens and the Earth. The rabbis read in Genesis that God finished this work, but elsewhere in the Scriptures they found that the divine activity of sustaining the creation is ongoing and as yet unfinished because God has promised to create ‘new heavens and a new earth’ (Isa. 65.17; 66.22). If God’s work has yet to be completed, they argued, then God does not rest on the Sabbath. In fact, even Gen. 2.1-3, a foundational text for the idea of Sabbath rest, ascribes a significant Sabbath activity to God, that of blessing the seventh day and making it holy. The rabbis noticed that in Genesis the Sabbath has no evening, so this day with no night became a symbol of the eschatological future, an aeon when Isaiah’s vision of an endless day would be fulfilled, a day lit not by the sun, but by the divine glory (Isa. 60.19-20; see also Rev. 21.23; 22.5). A Mishnaic commentary on the biblical superscript to Ps. 92, ‘A Song for the Sabbath’ explains that this psalm – where the poet sings for joy at the works of God’s hands, including the flourishing of the righteous ‘like a palm tree’ and ‘like a cedar in Lebanon’ – is ‘a song for the world to come, for the day which is wholly Sabbath rest for eternity’ (m.Tamid 7.4). According to the Fragmentary Targum Exod. 20.8, ‘On account of honouring the Sabbath, the Israelites will inherit the world to come which is entirely Sabbath.’13 In Jewish thought, ‘The reality that the Sabbath represents – God’s unchallenged and uncompromising mastery, blessing, and hallowing – is consistently and irreversibly available only in the world-to-come. Until then, it is known only in the tantalizing experience of the Sabbath.’14

7. §5 Now that day was a Sabbath (Jn 5.9) Against this conceptual background, the two Sabbath healings that the Johannine Jesus performs – the Bethezda healing (Jn 5.2-18) and the giving of sight to the man born blind (9.1-7) – show him bringing to realization what the Sabbath represented, by making people whole (7.23). This raises the issue of the variety of meanings that the Scriptures attach to the Sabbath and which of them might be influential in these two scenes. The idea that Sabbath rest imitates the rest of God after the six days of creation (Exod. 20.8-11; Lev. 23.3) is one interpretation and this corresponds to the meaning of the Hebrew verb shabat: to stop, to cease. The story of the manna collected on the previous day being sufficient to tide the Israelites over the Sabbath so that ‘those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage’ (Exod. 16.18) presents the Sabbath as a day for knowing and celebrating that one has enough and for resisting the temptation to ‘gather more’ (Amos 8.5; Isa. 58.13-14). Deuteronomy adds to this the idea that the Sabbath recalls the Exodus and therefore involves granting redemption to the enslaved (Deut. 5.15). The easing of the burden of work on the Sabbath applies

13. M. L. Klein, The Fragment-Targums of the Pentateuch according to Their Extant Sources, vol. 2 (Analecta Biblica series; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1980), pp. 53–54. 14. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, p. 123.

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not only to humans but also to animals (Exod. 20.10; Deut. 5.14). The Sabbath principle is even extended to the land which must be allowed to rest completely for one out of every seven years and given its ‘jubilee year’ (Lev. 25). This enacted God’s justice in renewing the soil, providing the poor with food, cancelling debts, returning land to families and liberating slaves. In Ezekiel the Sabbath is linked, by means of the ‘prince’ (Ezek. 34.23-24), to the fulfilment of the promises to David (46.1-8; see also Jer. 17.24-25). In Isa. 56.1-8, conscientious Sabbath observance hastens the coming salvation and the eschatological ingathering of all the nations. The Sabbath is ‘the day in the present age that symbolizes God’s act of inbreaking and consummation of the age to come’.15 The controversy in both Johannine Sabbath healing scenes is not so much about authority to interpret Torah, as about Jesus’ claim that his healing activity on the Sabbath implies a close association – or even an identification – with God’s ongoing parental work of sustaining the creation in being and bringing it to wholeness (Jn 5.18). The discourse, following the Bethzatha healing, about resurrection and judgement (5.19-30) suggests that the particular dimension of the divine Sabbath work in view here is God’s activity of rewarding the righteous by giving them life and punishing the wicked by judging them. For Jesus’ opponents, this is a way of acting ‘too congruent with God for their comfort’.16 Thus, in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus’ performance of divine Sabbath work points to his true identity and brings to realization what the Sabbath, as a special day of blessing, symbolizes: the future aeon of fulfilment and healing from all astheneia, the age that Johannine believers already inhabit, having received Jesus’ gift of ‘eternal life’ (Chapter 5, §8). In doing God’s ongoing work of giving life to the world, Jesus is doing what he has learnt from his Father. The Evangelist draws here on a universal human instinct, shared by other animals: that the young watch and imitate what they see their parents doing. There is also the suggestion here of an apprenticeship in which a craftsman shares his knowledge, skills and even his ‘trade secrets’ with his son, so that he can continue the father’s work. ‘The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing’ (Jn 5.20; 14.10). C.H. Dodd suggests that this picture of a son learning his father’s trade – a ‘hidden parable in the Fourth Gospel’ – draws on Greco-Roman models where accepting a young man into an indentured apprenticeship was regarded as analogous to adoption.17 In bringing the paralysed man from astheneia to health and wholeness Jesus is demonstrating the work that he has learnt from his Father, that the Father has sent him to do and that he now sends his disciples to do (20.21). Actually, they are to do ‘even greater works’ (14.12). The disciples are empowered for this work because, like Jesus, the apprentice-son, they are ‘taught by God’ (6.45; 15.15).

15. Burer, Divine Sabbath Work, p. 48. 16. Ibid., p. 133. 17. C. H. Dodd, More New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), pp. 30–40.

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7. §6 The Father who dwells in me does his works (Jn 14.10) Thinking about this in Earth-conscious mode, we might ask what this work of God that Jesus does and that he sends his disciples to do might be. The primary human work is gardening, the tilling and caring for the Earth. The Creator puts the human being in the paradeisos ‘to work (LXX: ergazesthai) it and protect it’ (Gen. 2.15). The retelling of the Garden of Eden story in Jubilees has not just Adam, but his wife Eve as well, ‘tilling and guarding [the garden] from birds, beasts and cattle, and gathering its fruit and eating’ for a period of seven years. God gives them this work to do and teaches them everything appropriate for tilling (Jub. 3.15-16.35). Jeremiah urged the exiles in Babylon to plant gardens (Jer. 29.5). This was one of the ways in which they could seek the welfare of the city where they were exiled because their own welfare depended on it (29.7). We suggested above (Chapter 3, §9) that in many ways we of the global North live in ‘exile’ from our Earth home, in forgetfulness of our membership of life-sustaining ecosystems. Norman Wirzba offers this advice for exiles: Insofar as people practice the attention and discipline of good work that honours the Creator and affirms the need and nurture of creation’s membership, they share in the life-giving ways of God. The crucial point, however, is that human hope for a good life and a healthy home depends on the affirmation of creatureliness and the embrace of the memberships of life. The path out of exile is a path inspired and directed by God’s own care-full, life-creating work in the world.18

7. §7 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) Disciples of Jesus are sent, as he was sent, to perform ‘their labour until the evening’ (Ps. 104.23) in the garden of the world. Whatever they can do – whether by influencing policymakers to implement big sustainability projects, or by the small gestures of waste-avoidance, energy saving or recycling that they make as individuals – their work can be ‘the finite form of God’s’.19 Jesus’ command to the paralysed man, ‘Walk!’ might well be heeded by those of us in the global North who overuse our cars. Active transport initiatives such as walking and cycling – especially if tied in with sustainable transport solutions – can produce immense health benefits not only for people but for the wider Earth community. Walking also has immense symbolic power. Jesus’ disciples were in the thick of the worldwide marches prior to and during the 2015 COP 21 conference in Paris when vast crowds took to the streets of their cities to call for a serious global commitment to the addressing of climate change. This is where they belong.

18. Wirzba, Food & Faith, 76. 19. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 54, 104.

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Over the centuries healthcare, especially for the poor, has been a major way in which Jesus’ followers have sought to continue his work of making astheneia give way to zōē. We are learning now that much human illness is a direct result of what Pope Francis has called the sickness of ‘our Sister, Mother Earth’, its symptoms ‘evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life’, consigning Earth to a degraded condition ‘among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor’.20 The mark of Jesus’ twenty-first-century disciples must surely be their commitment to the healing of Earth’s astheneia and to the easing of its impacts on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. A recent report of the Lancet Commission has made the point that damage done to Earth is damage done to ourselves and that, therefore, climate change is a public health issue. It causes loss of life through extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves. It is responsible for respiratory and cardiac illness caused by air pollution, for malnutrition as crop yields decline and for numerous health problems due to a shortage of clean drinking water. Its social impacts, as sea levels rise, will increasingly involve mass migration, homelessness and conflict, as pressure increases on scarce food and water resources. The international and multidisciplinary commission that produced the Lancet report, however, sounds a note of hope and even exhilaration. ‘Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.’21 To grasp this opportunity constructively and eagerly is to do the work of God. Jesus’ Sabbath healings, bringing the purpose of the Sabbath to realization, invite his followers to practise Sabbath. In the ‘one-third world’ where people are privileged to have enough to live on, this will involve resisting the efforts of advertisers to persuade them that they need more. The consumer model depends on people being discontented and restless. The Sabbath way, in contrast, is to stop, and to rest in joy and peace, because we have enough and it is all ‘very good’ (Gen. 1.31). As Norman Wirzba suggests, ‘Sabbath is not an optional reprieve in the midst of an otherwise frantic or obsessive life. It is the goal of all existence because in the Sabbath creation becomes what it fully ought to be. It is an invitation to paradise understood as genuine delight.’22

20. Laudato Si’, par. 1–2. 21. N. Watts, W. N. Adger, S. Ayeb-Karlsson, Y. Bai, P. Byass, D. Campbell-Lendrum, T. Colbourn, P. Cox, M. Davies, M. Depledge, et al., ‘Health and Climate Change: Policy Responses to Protect Public Health’, The Lancet 386, Issue 10006 (2015), pp. 1861–1914. 22. Wirzba, Food and Faith, p. 45.

Chapter 8 T HE B READ OF L IFE

This chapter deals with Jesus’ provision of food for about five thousand people and the long discourse that follows. The feeding story is the only ‘miracle’ of Jesus recounted in all four gospels (Mk 6.32-44; Mt. 14.13-21; Lk. 9.11-17). Mark even has a second version of it, the feeding of four thousand (Mk 8.1-9). In view of this, the distinctive features of the Johannine account will be particularly instructive for our Earth-conscious reading.

8. §1 The Sea of Galilee of Tiberias (Jn 6.1) As John 6 begins, the scene moves from Jerusalem to beyond or on the other side (the eastern side?) of ‘the Sea of Galilee of Tiberias’ (Jn 6.1 literal translation) which, of course, is actually a freshwater lake. Luke and Josephus always refer to the twelve-by-twenty-kilometre body of water in the centre of Galilee as the lake, reserving the word ‘sea’ for the Mediterranean. However, ancient people who had never seen the ocean perceived a large body of water as a sea. John is the only Evangelist to use the colonial name (also in Jn 21.1) that linked the lake with Tiberias, the new capital city on the west side of the lake that the tetrarch Herod Antipas had founded around 20 CE as a centre of Roman administration and named in honour of the emperor reigning at the time (Chapter 4, §2). It would seem that from then on people, or at least those more accepting of this policy of ingratiation, started calling the Sea of Galilee the ‘Tiberian’ sea, possibly even recognizing the etymological homage to the Tiber (Latin and Greek: Tiberis) the great navigable river that brought the tribute of subject peoples flowing into Rome – their grain, oil, wine, fish and timber. Antipas and his elite retainers would certainly have seen political and economic advantage in including the lake in this dedication of territory to their Roman overlord. Whatever the Evangelist’s reason for adding ‘of Tiberias’, for us today it underscores the hubris of the imperial claim to ownership of the entire (known) world’s natural resources, in this case, a lake whose waters teemed with potential for tribute and tax revenue. In the Galilee of Jesus’ day, and for the intended audience, the idea that the Earth and everything in it belonged to God (Ps. 24.1) would have been a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing myth that the Earth and everything in it was the emperor’s, a myth

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enacted in military conquest, taxation and tribute. The similarities to corporate colonialization in our world today would not be lost on ecologically alert readers. The crowd that has been following Jesus (the imperfect tense indicating duration) is identified at first as people who have seen the signs, the life-giving effects of his impact on those subject to astheneia (Chapter 7, §2), either physical or socio-economic, as would certainly have been the case for many of those in this scene. The discovery of imported vessels and glassware in recent excavations at Capernaum – in the vicinity of which this scene is set (Jn 6.17, 24, 59) – has undermined the conventional view that its people were all impoverished.1 However, the crowd that followed Jesus would certainly have included villagers unable to get more than occasional work as day labourers, the better off earning a bare subsistence living as farm workers, artisans or fishermen, people beset by disease caused by poor food supply, contagion and ignorance. Perhaps these nonelite people could not afford to attend the Passover Festival in Jerusalem that the Evangelist tells us was at hand. Maybe the burden of taxation both by Rome and by the local client king, temple tithes and rents made that impossible. But Jesus is about to put on for them ‘a counter-Passover: without money, without sacral slaughter and without the Jerusalem priesthood that oversees the exchange of one for the other’.2 As Jesus acts out God’s intention that everyone should have ample food to sustain life, astheneia gives way to zoē, the abundant life that he has come into the kosmos to bring (10.10), a fullness of life to be lived, not in some future age, not in another better world, but in the earthly materiality of the here and now. The use of the word zoē in the Fourth Gospel will actually peak in John 6 where the word occurs eighteen times.

8. §2 There was a great deal of grass in the place (Jn 6.10) Awareness of the agricultural origins of the festivals around which the Fourth Gospel narrative is entwined can enhance an eco-hermeneutical reading. As we have seen (Chapter 5, §2), Passover is redolent of spring renewal. This celebration of Israel’s liberation from slavery coincides with the time when the rains are over and the grain is beginning to ripen. To this day, around Passover time, the hills sloping down to the Sea of Galilee are covered in lush green grass, flecked with delicate wild flowers. This grass does not last long, as spring quickly gives way to the scorching heat of summer, so the Fourth Evangelist’s reference to it is a delightfully authentic touch, placing this scene in the exact phase of the land’s annual cycle that corresponds to Passover being at hand (Jn 6.4). It is from his

1. S. L. Mattila, ‘Revisiting Jesus’ Capernaum: A Village of Only Subsistence-Level Fishers and Farmers?’, in The Galilean Economy in the Time of Jesus (ed. D. A. Fiensey and R. K. Hawkins; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 75–138 (90). 2. A. D. Callahan, A Love Supreme: A History of the Johannine Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), pp. 61–2.

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vantage point sitting with his disciples on one of these swards of spring grass that Jesus can see how large the crowd that is coming towards him – both literally and metaphorically – actually is. Keenly aware of their neediness, he puts what the Evangelist tells us is a test question to Philip. ‘Where are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?’ (6.5). The test that Philip is being set up to fail hinges on that distinction between the literal and the metaphorical that, earlier in the narrative, Nicodemus also failed to grasp (Jn 3.12). As we have noted (Chapter 5, §6), such contrasts are part of the Fourth Evangelist’s use of double entendre. Just as the people are coming to Jesus by climbing up the grassy hillside to where he is sitting with his disciples, they are also coming to him on a spiritual quest. The significance of the literal hill climb is not in any way diminished just because it also functions as a symbol. Similarly, the fact that Jesus’ provision of sustenance for natural life points metaphorically to his provision of the sustenance for ‘eternal life’ in no way makes the actual bread and fish inconsequential. In fact, the significance of the food’s materiality is emphasized in the Johannine account of this scene, precisely because of the Fourth Gospel’s insistence on the ‘here-and-now-ness’ of the life that Jesus gives. The bread and fish provided by the Earth’s generosity and received from Jesus’ hand sustain bodies of flesh and blood as the people engage in the basic life-sustaining activity of all living things: consuming other once-living things. To be alive – to eat! – is to be the beneficiary of a garden’s life-giving ways. Though many of us live in houses that increasingly separate us from land and the realities of plant and animal life, our fundamental and inescapable home is the land that feeds and sustains the house. We live by eating, which means we live  through food that invariably has roots extending into garden soil. Whenever we take a bite of food, we confirm with the unmistakable evidence of our stomachs that the literal bases of life rest upon the growth and death, and the diversity and fragility, of the countless organisms and processes that dwell together in a garden.3

It is by sustaining physical human life that the bread and fish point to the food that Jesus really wants to give, ‘the food that endures for zoē aiōnios’ (6.27). And this ‘life of the aeon’, the flourishing that God intends for all creation, that people thought would not happen until a new golden age dawned, is not some future other-worldly existence. It is a new way of living on Earth now, a way of living that is in harmony with the energy sustaining the creation that the Evangelist has earlier told us is enfleshed in Jesus (1.14; Chapter 5, §8). Returning to Jesus’ test question to Philip, the Greek adverb pothen can mean ‘how’ but can also function as an interrogative of place. The NRSV revisers have changed the RSV ‘how’ to ‘where’, thereby giving quite a different slant to the question. Later in the gospel we will learn that the disciples have a common fund

3. Wirzba, Food & Faith, pp. 37–8.

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(Gk, glossokomon: money box) from which they regularly donate to the poor (Jn 12.5-6; 13.29).4 This was probably ‘a coin case or coin box adopted as a security arrangement by Jerusalem pilgrims for transporting temple redemption money, taxes and alms’.5 Jesus, if understood at the literal level, would seem to intend that his group use this fund to provide food for the crowd and is asking – with characteristic Johannine irony – where in the vicinity of this hill that they have just climbed there might possibly be a market where bread could be bought. The verb agorazō means to buy in the market, the agora. The test seems to be whether Philip will respond at this ‘earthly’ level or whether he might sense that the crowd’s real hunger is far deeper than a craving for bread that can be bought in an agora. Predictably Philip walks into the trap with what Robert J. Karris calls his ‘business manager’s answer: we have money, but not the amount it would take to feed this crowd’.6 As the narrative progresses, Jesus will address precisely this issue. ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life which the Human One (NRSV: Son of Man) will give you’ (6.27).

8. §3 Five barley loaves and two fish (Jn 6.9) Andrew has spotted a young lad there who has five loaves of bread and two fish. The Fourth Gospel is unique in specifying that the loaves were made of barley flour. This detail accentuates the reminiscence of a scene where a man brings the prophet Elisha a gift of twenty barley loaves for his hungry followers. When ordered to distribute them, Elisha’s servant objects that twenty loaves could not possibly satisfy one hundred men. All eat their fill, however, and there is even some left over, as God has assured Elisha there would be (2 Kgs 4.42-44).While this Elisha echo is part of the Evangelist’s project of telling us who Jesus is, or even who he surpasses, an ecological reading would zoom in on the barley loaves, resisting a spiritualizing tendency to dismiss them as a mere husk that we can strip away to reveal something more profound, as if the only real import of Jn 6.1-15 is christological. As we will soon see, there are indications in the Fourth Gospel that, at least in an early stratum of the Johannine writings, the bread that believers share to express their belonging to Jesus is not identified as something else – Jesus’ body. It is not bread of special significance because it represents something more ‘spiritual’. It is simply bread in all its materiality, the staff of human life on Earth, but bread shared in a spirit of love and service by those who belong to Jesus and see him as the bread that sustains their ‘eternal life’ (Jn 6.35).

4. Karris, Jesus and the Marginalized, pp. 27–8. For a convenient summary of recent N. T. scholarship on this topic, see R. J. Karris, ‘The Place of the Money-Bag in the SecularMendicant Controversy at Paris’, Franciscan Studies 68 (2010), pp. 21–38 (21–4). 5. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, p. 206. 6. Karris, Jesus and the Marginalized, p. 31.

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An ecological perspective on the barley loaves would attend to the soil’s productivity, to the human agricultural activity that produced the barley and to the work of women who ground the grain, kneaded the dough and baked the loaves. Barley was sown once the early autumn rains had softened the ground to allow ploughing. The first cereal crop to ripen, it was brought to the temple on the second day of Passover as an offering of the ‘first fruits’ of the year’s new grain harvest. Able to grow in poor soil and resistant to heat and drought, barley was the food of the poor (three times cheaper than wheat in Rev. 6.6). ‘Because of the gluten content of cereals, wheat makes the best leavened bread, rye is second best, and barley can only be used for unleavened bread.’7 The boy’s five loaves (artoi) are the produce of village women baking daily in a communal oven. Artos refers to ‘a relatively small and generally round loaf of bread’.8 In this case they would have been flat, unleavened cakes of bread, possibly containing millet, spelt or pea meal mixed with barley.9 With regard to the two fish, the Greek text does not let us know which of the eighteen species indigenous to the lake these might have been. A couple of sardines, the most plentiful fish in the lake, possibly even dried and salted, would be a typical lunch that a Galilean peasant mother might pack for her son. Even though the lake teemed with sardines and other larger fish (biny and musht), by the time fishermen had paid for fishing rights, compensated their helpers, observed the purity laws by sorting ‘clean’ from ‘unclean’ fish (Lev. 11.9-12), and handed over a sizeable proportion of their haul in a hefty tax or tribute to an official waiting on the shore, there was not much left to sustain a family. So no doubt, fish had to be carefully preserved and rationed.

8. §4 The poor shall eat and have their fill (Ps. 22.26) Andrew’s reaction to the young lad’s willingness to share his portion of bread and fish is another example of literal thinking. If even two hundred days’ wages worth of bread would be insufficient, how derisory do five loaves and two fish seem! ‘What are they among so many people?’ (Jn 6.9). Yet Jesus simply asks the disciples to get the people (hoi anthrōpoi) to recline, in other words, to prepare to eat. An eco-feminist reader would see a familiar pattern in the fact that it is the menfolk (hoi andres) who promptly stretch out on the grass in expectation of a free meal being handed to them, no less than five thousand of them! By mentioning the verdant green grass on which they lie down, the Evangelist alludes to another scriptural passage, Psalm 23 (LXX 22). Activating this resonance highlights the role of the more-than-human in this scene. The people are about to experience that in Jesus God is shepherding them, that they lack nothing, that God is inviting

7. S. A. Reed, ‘Bread’, in ABD I, pp. 777–80. 8. Louw and Nida, I, p. 50. 9. I. Jacob and W. Jacob, ‘Flora’, in ABD II, pp. 803–17 (808–9).

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them to abide (Ps. 22.1 LXX, kataskēnoō) in a place that is verdantly green (Ps. 22.1 LXX: chloē) with the early shoots of spring grass, that they are about to be nourished there beside the restful waters of the lake. This intimation of Jesus’ role as the ideal or model shepherd prepares for a more extended treatment later in the gospel (Jn 10.11-18; Chapter 10, §4–§6). In taking the loaves and the fish, Jesus is receiving them from a young boy who is willing to share the little that he has. In giving thanks – ‘saying grace’ – Jesus draws on his Jewish tradition’s capacity for relishing food as a gift from God and a blessing to be shared. He uses the berakah form of prayer that acknowledges God as the cause of the land’s fruitfulness and the lake’s bounty. In distributing the loaves, he enacts God’s provision of sustenance for all living things, human and other-than human, all the interconnected links in the food chain that is integral to the functioning of the creation. A Galilean meadow where people enjoy a generous meal becomes a vision of Eden. For them, ‘paradise is opened, the tree of life is planted, the age to come is prepared, plenty is provided’ (4 Ezra 8.52). The anticipated aeon has dawned when God’s flock ‘will rest in good luxury (Gk, tryphē: revelling, luxury, splendour) and in lush pasture as they feed on the mountains of Israel’ (Ezek. 34.14, LXX). The verbs, ‘took’, ‘gave thanks’ and ‘gave’ (Gk, diadidomi: distribute, a cognate of didomai, to give) reflect Jewish meal customs where the presider at a meal – the father in a household or the leader of a fellowship group – would bless the Creator who causes food to grow out of the Earth while breaking and sharing a loaf of bread among all the diners. The breaking of the loaves, not specifically mentioned in the Johannine account of this scene, would be presupposed. The three verbs inevitably remind a Christian audience today of Jesus’ interpretive words over the bread and cup at the Last Supper, so familiar because of their liturgical use. It is important, though, to note that the Fourth Gospel does not report these interpretive words, and to take this divergence from 1 Cor. 11.23-25 and the synoptic ‘Last Supper’ accounts (Mk 14.22-24; Mt. 26.26-29; Lk 22.17-20) as seriously as we do other instances of Johannine distinctiveness. The Fourth Gospel witnesses to the diversity of eucharistic origins.10 It reveals a strand of the early Jesus movement where what made the community’s meal an occasion of communion with Jesus was not the identification of bread and wine as his body and blood, but the practice of washing one another’s feet (Jn 13.14-15). This interpretation of the meals of some early Jesus believers is still represented in the gospel, coexisting with a redactional passage about eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood (6.51c-58) that reflects the

10. J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 360–7; B. Chilton, A Feast of Meanings: Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus through Johannine Circles (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). P. F. Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins (London: SPCK, 2004), pp. 1–15. For a brief summary of the issues, see M. Daly-Denton, ‘Looking beyond the Upper Room: Eucharistic Origins in Contemporary Research’, Search 31, 1 (2008), pp. 3–15.

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form of eucharistic understanding and practice that was eventually to win out (§9 below; Chapter 13, §3). The Fourth Gospel is also distinctive in insisting that Jesus himself – not the disciples – hands the food to the people reclining on the grass (6.11), giving them as much as they want. This is part of the gospel’s emphasis on each believer’s direct relationship with Jesus, shown, for example, in the absence in the narrative generally of any distinction between an inner circle of ‘apostles’ and a larger group of ‘disciples’. Another unique feature in the Johannine presentation of this scene is the use of the verb empimplēmi (to fill to the full) in Jn 6.12. The synoptics all use forms of the verb chortazō (to eat to the full, to be satisfied) as John does in a retrospective reference to the feeding in 6.26. The verb empimplēmi stresses Jesus’ agency in filling hungry stomachs, while also echoing Ps. 22.26 (LXX Ps. 21.27). The poor shall eat and be filled (emplēsthēsontai) and they shall praise the Lord that seek him: their heart shall live for ever.

This psalm will be an important scriptural witness to Jesus, particularly in the account of his garments being shared out among his executioners (Jn 19.23-24), citing Ps. 22.18 (LXX Ps. 21.19). So the reader who is alert to the whole psalm with its ‘Johannine’ resonances – seeking the Lord, being gifted with ‘eternal life’ – is reminded of the cost for Jesus of what this fourth sign (Jn 6.14) represents.

8. §5 Gather up the fragments that nothing may be lost (Jn 6.12) All four gospels tell of the twelve baskets of leftover food. The Greek word for basket, kophinos is used in all four gospel accounts of this scene, but replaced by spyris in the second Markan feeding story (Mk 8.8, 20). A kophinos is ‘a relatively large basket used primarily for food or produce’.11 Rigid wicker baskets – often made with reeds – were commonplace as they were also used as fish traps, but baskets were also made of grasses or flax. Apart from that it is impossible to be more precise, except to add that the Evangelist’s near contemporary Juvenal mentions in his Satires destitute Jews living in Rome whose only household goods were a basket (Lat., cophinus) and a bit of hay (Juvenal, Satires III.14). The NRSV description of the remaining food as ‘left over’ is actually quite a weak translation of the word perissousanta (also used in Matthew’s and Luke’s telling of this story) which conveys a sense of extraordinary, overflowing abundance. The surplus remaining after an enormous crowd has been fed to satiety is even more remarkable when set within the context of the tributary economy in which most people would have struggled to survive, with a powerful and distant elite taking for their own consumption what they deemed to be surplus. Warren Carter,

11. Louw and Nida, I, pp. 71–2.

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writing with a consciousness of the Roman Empire as a pervading presence in both the Palestine of Jesus’ time and the urban Mediterranean world of the intended audience, suggests that this scene may well be trumping the occasional distribution of free food that was part of the propaganda intended to portray the emperor, or his representative, as a munificent benefactor.12 There are two distinctive details in John’s report of the surplus. First, Jesus takes the initiative in telling the disciples to gather up the leftover fragments. Second, Jesus explains why: ‘so that nothing may be lost’ (Jn 6.12). Commentators who see in this scene a prefiguration of the Eucharist typically draw attention to the Didache’s word for the fragments of the broken eucharistic loaf (Gk, klasmata: broken pieces; Did. 9.3, 4) the word also used in Jn 6.12. Our liturgical experience conditions us to think in terms of respect for the consecrated bread of the Eucharist. An ecological reading pursues quite a different line, noting that, on Jesus’ instructions, the disciples cleaned up after the meal, restoring the landscape and repairing whatever damage had been done, and that, on Jesus’ insistence, they ensured that no food would be wasted.

8. §6 They saw Jesus walking on the sea (Jn 6.19) Along with Mark and Matthew, the Fourth Evangelist knows that for the landlocked peasants of Galilee the lake was their ‘sea’. The fourfold use of the word thalassa in this scene is surely intended to invest the lake with all the mythic symbolism associated with the ocean. This invites us to read this scene with the seas of our world in mind: 140 million square miles in area, covering 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface, and accounting for 97 per cent of the planet’s water. However, our seas are threatened in various ways. Their fragility and vulnerability comes through in a comparison made by the Irish meteorologist, Brendan McWilliams. ‘If we were to imagine the Earth as a billiard ball, the ocean would be an almost unnoticeable film of dampness on its surface.’13 The Sea of Galilee is frequently whipped up by sudden violent storms. The experience of crossing it in turbulent conditions would have heightened the sense of threat associated with ‘the Deep’. The boats plying the lake would have been frail craft. In Jn 6.22 one of them is called a ploiarion (the diminutive of Gk, ploion: boat). The disciples’ boat was quite possibly similar to the Galilee Boat, an oak and cedar hull of a first century CE boat found on the drought-dried shore of the Sea of Galilee in 1986, currently on display in the Yigal Alon Center at Kibbutz Ginnosar on the Sea of Galilee. The ancient Israelites seem not to have been natural seafarers. Greek Solomon counts among the wonders worked by divine Wisdom in the world that ‘people trust their lives even to the smallest piece of wood, and passing through the billows on a raft they come safely to land’ (Wis. 14.5). Fear

12. Carter, John and Empire, p. 226. 13. B. McWilliams, Illustrated Weather Eye (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012), p. 152.

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of the sea crops up frequently in the Scriptures: fear of shipwreck (Ps. 107.23-27), fear of drowning (Jon. 2.3; Ps. 69.1-2; 124.4-5) and the consciousness that it is only because the sea’s waves are held in check continually by God that they do not inundate the land, causing the Earth to revert to the primeval chaos (Job 38.8-11; Jer. 5.22). The disciples go down to the sea (Jn 6.16), like those ‘who went down to the sea in ships’ whose story is told in Ps. 107.23-27. It is evening in a part of the world where darkness falls quickly. As in the psalm, the sea rises and the wind becomes strong, but what really frightens the disciples is the sight of Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat. As Catrin H. Williams explains, in the synoptic accounts of this scene the disciples fear that they are seeing a ghost and Jesus’ Egō eimi reassures them that it is he (Mk 6.49; Mt. 14.26). In the Fourth Gospel, the disciples recognize Jesus but what frightens them is that he is walking on the water.14 The Johannine Jesus’ words, Egō eimi, ‘It is I’ (Jn 6.20) would have been heard, therefore as an explanation of Jesus’ epiphanic activity of walking on the water. Re-readers would be familiar with the gospel’s other instances of this usage of Egō eimi – without the tempering effect of a predicate – that come to a climax in Jesus’ provocative declaration, ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (8.58). Thus Egō eimi has to be an assertion of divine identity (Exod. 3.14; Isa. 43.10-11). In this first occurrence, the wealth of scriptural allusion in the whole scene suggests so much more than the synoptic identification formula, ‘It is I, [Jesus]’. To make ‘a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters’ is a divine prerogative (Isa. 43.16; Ps. 77.19; Job 9.8 LXX). It would seem that the awaited theophany on the waters of Bethzatha (Jn 5.7), the coming of God ‘on the wings of the wind’ (Ps. 104.3), is happening here. The story continues to follow the ‘plot’ of Psalm 107. The NRSV translation, ‘They wanted to take him into the boat’ conveys the imperfect tense (they were wishing to). There is an implication that they do not need to because the boat immediately reaches the shore, even though their encounter with Jesus takes place twenty-five or thirty stadia (5–6 kilometres) out on the ‘sea’ (Jn 6.19). ‘Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven’ (Ps. 107.30). As their frail wooden craft, their ‘paltry piece of wood’ (Wis. 10.4), is steered safely to dry ground, they join the long list of people, from Adam through the wilderness generation, who have been saved by Wisdom (9.18).

8. §7 Believe in the one whom God has sent (Jn 6.29) Jesus’ unexplained arrival at Capernaum on the other side of the ‘sea’ has set the people on a quest which Jesus will quickly expose as no more than the pursuit of free bread. Rather than putting all their energy into a quest for what is perishable,

14. C. H. Williams, ‘“I am” or “I am He”: Self-Declaratory Pronouncements in the Fourth Gospel and Rabbinic Interpretation’, in Jesus in Johannine Tradition (ed. R. T. Fortna and T. Thatcher; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 343–52 (346).

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they should be working for ‘the food that endures for eternal life’ that he is willing to give them for free (Jn 6.27). The phraseology here is strikingly similar to his earlier offer to give the Samaritan woman, engaging in her laborious quest for exhaustible well water, ‘a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (4.13-15). The responses to both offers – ‘Sir, give me this water’ (4.15); ‘Sir, give us this bread’ (6.34) – can be heard in two ways: as requests for earthly bread and water that totally underestimate what Jesus is offering, or as prayers that Johannine believers address to the exalted Jesus (Gk. vocative, Kyrie: Sir, Lord) asking for his gift of ‘living water’ and ‘living bread’. All of this echoes Isaiah’s invitation to all who thirst to come to the waters and drink at no charge, rather than spending their money on that which is not bread and labouring for that which does not satisfy (Isa. 55.1-2). The people, therefore, ask Jesus, what exactly they should be working for and what it might mean to be doing God’s work in the world. Jesus replies that to believe in the one whom God has sent is to be doing God’s work (Jn 6.29). The Evangelist uses here a particular construction, to ‘believe into’ (pisteuein eis), rather than the more usual ‘believe in’ (pisteuein en). This distinctive Johannine expression first appeared in the gospel’s prologue (Jn 1.12), then several times in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus (3.16, 18, 36). It reoccurs in Jn 6.29, 35, 40 and, in some manuscripts, verse 47. The prologue’s reference to the Son being ‘in[to] the bosom of the Father’ (1.18; eis ton kolpon tou patros) makes similar use of the preposition eis. While there is something static about ‘in’, there is a certain dynamism about ‘into’ and this explains why believing in[to] Jesus is something performative. It is work, action and not just assent to certain ideas or opinions about him. Perhaps the idiomatic English expression ‘to buy into’ a project or a person’s worldview (originally referring to the buying of shares as an investment in a company) goes some way towards helping us understand the practical and even costly pledge involved in pisteuein eis. So in an Earth-conscious understanding, to do God’s work is to share in God’s performative cherishing of the kosmos and, following Jesus’ paradigm (13.15), to invest daringly in sustaining care for its flourishing.

8. §8 I am the bread of life (Jn 6.35, 48) In the continuing dialogue that will presently give way to discourse, the crowd introduces the topic of the manna, challenging Jesus to impress them with an equally compelling sign. There may well be behind this a popular expectation that in the final aeon the miracle of the manna would be repeated. The earliest extant evidence we have for this belief is a passage in 2 Baruch dating from the early second century CE. ‘And it will happen at that time that the treasury of manna will come down again from on high, and they will eat of it in those years because these are they who will have arrived at the consummation of time’ (2 Baruch 29.8).15 As

15. OTP I, p. 631.

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the gospel’s allusions to the water-flowing rock indicate (Chapter 6, §4; 16, §2), this is part of a familiar and long-standing idea that a repetition of the prodigies of the exodus would inaugurate the age to come. The manna, this fine, flake-like substance that sustained the Israelites during their wilderness journey (Exod. 16.130) has been given several natural explanations. ‘The most common … proposes its connection with a gum resin produced by one or more varieties of flowering trees, such as Alhagi maurorum (Sinai manna), Tamarisk gallica or Fraxinus ornus (flowering ash)’.16 Alhagi maurorum, also called camels’ thorn, exudes a sweet juice that evaporates into small grains that must be harvested early or otherwise they will dissolve in the sun’s heat.17 The divine response to the Israelites’ murmuring, ‘I am going to rain bread from heaven for you’ (Exod. 16.4) was grist to the mill of biblical retelling. One line of interpretation plays down its function as nourishment for hungry people, saying that it taught Israel ‘that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’ (Deut. 8.3). A different succession of interpretations focuses on its taste: ‘like wafers made with honey’ (Exod. 16.31), ‘like the taste of cakes baked with oil’ (Num. 11.8), providing every culinary pleasure and adapting to every taste, according to Greek Solomon (Wis. 16.20-21). Other interpretations focus on its heavenly origin as ‘the grain of heaven’ and ‘the bread of angels’ (Ps. 78.24-25). The descent of the manna rained down from the skies onto the Earth resonates with the coming down of the divine word from heaven to accomplish God’s purpose of ‘giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater’ (Isa. 55.10-11). It also recalls the descent of Wisdom motif that has so profoundly informed the prologue to the gospel (Chapter 2, §1), especially since Wisdom herself invites people to come and eat of her bread (Prov. 9.5) and even Greek Solomon’s story of the manna suiting itself to every taste is part of his recital of the saving work of Wisdom in the world (Wis. 9.18). All of these interpretive threads are woven into the discourse. Using the egō eimi construction with its subtle intimation of divine self-disclosure, Jesus identifies himself as ‘the bread of life’ (Jn 6.35, 48) and the living bread (6.51) that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (6.33). Variations on this theme fill out the manna metaphor bit by bit, adding clarity and alerting the audience to the depth and richness of the scriptural underlay. The discourse hints, by means of three contrasts, that the bread of life is comparable to the fruit of the tree of life. Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat it, lest they die (Gen. 3.3), but this bread has come down from heaven ‘so that one may eat of it and not die’ (Jn 6.50). Adam is expelled from the garden lest he ‘take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’ (Gen. 3.22), but ‘whoever eats this bread will live for ever’ (Jn 6.51). God ‘drove out the man’ from the garden (Gen. 3.24), but Jesus says, ‘Anyone who comes to me I will not cast out’ (Jn 6.37 RSV). Wisdom, of course, is ‘a tree of life

16. J. C. Slayton, ‘Manna’, in ABD IV, p. 511. 17. R. Tyas, Flowers from the Holy Land (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1851), pp. 97–101.

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to those who lay hold of her’ (Prov. 3.18), so this links in with a major Johannine theme: that Jesus-Wisdom reverses the expulsion from Eden and opens access to ‘the tree of life that is in the paradise of God’ (Rev. 2.7; Chapter 16, §6). As the discourse interweaves the various strands of scriptural allusion in order to explain who Jesus is, where he comes from and what he is doing, the narrative audience divides into those who ‘buy into’ him and those who withdraw saying, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ (Jn 6.60).

8. §9 My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink (Jn 6.55) Echoing and surpassing Wisdom’s promise – ‘Those who eat of me will hunger for more, and those who drink of me will thirst for more’ (Sir. 24.21) – Jesus guarantees that whoever comes to him will never be hungry, and whoever believes in him will never be thirsty (Jn 6.35). The logic of the narrative so far leads the audience to expect that the thirst-quenching drink will be the living water that Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman with a promise that whoever drinks it will never thirst again (4.13-14). Yet as the discourse proceeds, we begin to hear about drinking Jesus’ blood, something quite unprepared for by what has gone before. This is because Jn 6.51c–58 is a redactional eucharistic interpretation of the preceding discourse.18 This is interesting from our Earth-conscious perspective because it shows that belief in Jesus as ‘the bread of life’ impacted on the early believers’ understanding of what they were doing when they met as a community of his disciples to share a meal. In the additional verses 51c to 58 there are several indications of a different hand at work. Jesus gives, rather than is, the bread (Jn 6.51c). Instead of having ‘eternal life’ now, believers in Jesus can look forward to being raised up on the last day (6.54), a point that the redactor stresses by adding a reference to believers being raised up on the last day to verses 39, 40 and 44.19 We find a similar introduction of futurist eschatology in the redactional Chapter 21 of the gospel: ‘until I come’ (21.22). There is also new, apparently eucharistic, terminology – the eating of Jesus’ ‘flesh’, linked with the drinking of (wine as) his blood. Identifying two redactional layers in the discourse solves the problem of the illogicality of Jesus’ reply to those unable to accept his words, ‘Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’ (6.62). With the eucharistic insertion in place, the ‘hard saying’ (6.60 RSV) is no longer Jesus’ claim to be the real ‘bread from heaven’, but the idea of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, something particularly offensive to Jewish believers (Gen. 9.4; Lev. 17.10-16; Acts 15.29). With the secondary addition bracketed, what is hard for Jesus’ hearers to

18. R. Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971) pp. 218–19, 234. 19. Bultmann, The Gospel of John, p. 219; H. Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London: SCM, 1990), pp. 247–8.

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take is his claim that he is ‘the bread that came down from heaven’ which is exactly what they murmured about in the first place (Jn 6.41-42). All of this gives us a glimpse of a community giving expression to their solidarity in faith as Jesus ‘own’ (Jn 13.1) by celebrating what would eventually be called the Eucharist. Initially they were content, it would seem, to share bread and water (Chapter 6, §5) and this they did as a symbolic expression of their belief in Jesus as their ‘living bread’ and ‘living water’. With their sapiential view of him, they would readily have seen themselves as guests at Wisdom’s banquet, being nourished with ‘the bread of understanding’ and being given ‘the water of wisdom to drink’ (Sir. 15.3), just as the wilderness generation had been given bread from heaven for their hunger and water from the rock for their thirst (Ps. 78.19-25; Neh. 9.15). The redactional addition to John 6 shows them absorbing a new dimension of eucharistic understanding and practice that has developed in Johannine circles as the synoptic/Pauline ‘institution narrative’ – significantly absent from the Fourth Gospel’s ‘Last Supper’ account – gradually becomes the dominant interpretation of Christian table fellowship (Chapter 13, §3). Perhaps, though, to share their bread and cup in the belief that they were thereby eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus – a development possible ‘only in a Hellenistic Christian community that took the eucharistic rite a step further under the influence of the surrounding religious customs’20 – was a step too far for some of them. The difficulty would only have been compounded for those – perhaps former disciples of John the Baptist (Jn 1.35) – whose religious ethos disposed them not only to horror at the idea of drinking blood but even to an avoidance of wine (Chapter 6, §4). All of this shows the importance for Johannine believers of the activity that most strongly reminds human beings of their membership of an interconnected biosphere. As Norman Wirzba comments, Jesus is not simply the provider of bread. He is the full meaning of bread, the nurture that ‘comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’ (6:33). The bread that Jesus is is not simply a product like manna that can temporarily satisfy a physical hunger. It is food for the healing, transformation and fulfilment of life rather than its mere continuation. If physical bread enables physiological life, the ‘bread of life’ inspires and empowers communion life.21

8. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) Viewing this gospel scene from the global North of our critically damaged common home, there are parallels between the crowd’s main preoccupation of eating their fill and our thinking that our hunger for fulfilment can be satisfied by more and

20. M. J. Cahill, ‘Drinking Blood at a Kosher Eucharist? The Sound of Scholarly Silence’, BTB 32 (2002), pp. 150–62 (160); Chilton, A Feast of Meanings, p. 141. 21. Wirzba, Food and Faith, p. 155.

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more consumption. The Greek verb agorazō, used in Jesus’ test question to Philip (Jn 6.5), can also mean frequenting the agora, or hanging around the market. Contemporary equivalents might be ‘retail therapy’ or ‘going malling’. In the cities of the one-third world, it is commonplace for dwindling church congregations to remark that shopping malls have become the new cathedrals and that the Christian Sunday has changed from a day of worship, hospitality and enjoyment of the creation into a day to ‘shop till you drop’, the day when the consumerism responsible for so much ecological damage may even reach its weekly peak. Jesus believers must swim against this tide. The crowd’s hunger cannot but remind us of people who lack food security in today’s world, a problem set to be exacerbated by climate change and biodiversity loss. In the global North, the blame for this is often laid on population growth in poorer countries. This, of course, excuses the privileged from facing up to the repercussions of their voracious lifestyle. The willingness of a young boy to share the little he had was instrumental in satisfying the crowd’s hunger. As Mohandas Gandhi is remembered for saying, ‘The Earth has enough for everyone’s need but not for their greed.’ For many people in the one-third world the act of eating has degenerated into fuel consumption, promoted by marketing slogans like ‘Grab and Go’. Food should be relished as a manifestation of the Creator’s provisioning care, to be seen, smelt, savoured and enjoyed, ideally in an atmosphere of conviviality and hospitality. We should know where our food comes from; we should care whether it was produced ethically. Whenever we eat, we acknowledge and celebrate our membership of an interdependent Earth community. Just as our fellow creatures nourish us, so we have a responsibility to care for them and ensure the integrity of their habitat. To ‘say grace’ as Jesus did (Jn 6.11), is to be conscious of our dependence on all the human gardening work and all the processes of the morethan-human creation that have combined to provide the food that sustains us so delightfully. As Norman Wirzba says, ‘When people say grace with their entire being, express it honestly and with considered appreciation for its deep theological and practical significance, they participate, however imperfectly, in the paradise of God.’22 Jesus’ twenty-first-century disciples, living in a world where food is wasted by a privileged minority while the majority go hungry every day, might find themselves reproached by the command of Jesus to gather up the surplus that nothing may be lost (Jn 6.12). Maybe too from our location in a world so often disfigured by the leftovers from human consumption – ranging from litter to large-scale industrial waste – we might note that the disciples cleaned up after the meal, restoring the landscape. Perhaps the Johannine Jesus’ words ‘that nothing may be lost’ might challenge his followers’ acceptance of ‘built in obsolescence’ and inspire them to see recycling as part of their alignment of their lives with Wisdom’s way. As Leonardo Boff notes, ‘A respectful use of all that we need and a willingness to recycle it when

22. Wirzba, p. 180; Laudato Si’ par. 227.

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it has fulfilled its purpose … is also the way of nature, which utilizes everything and wastes nothing.’23 Since performative ‘believing into’ Jesus means doing God’s creating and sustaining work (Jn 6.28-29), this will involve believers in learning to understand Earth’s ‘way’, in action and advocacy for Earth’s well-being and in using Earth’s gifts gratefully, respectfully and carefully. Since the 1970s the World Council of Churches has been urging its member churches to work for ‘Justice, Peace and the integrity of Creation’. Forty years of ecological damage later, Christian communities are only now, for example, facing up to the incongruity of promoting ‘de-creation’ by investing in fossil fuel industries. The burning of fossil fuels is the principal cause of climate change. It is also the greatest threat to its mitigation in the future, since the capacity is there to burn five times the amount of hydrocarbons that Earth can sustain. In the face of such a risk, people on a mission, as Jesus was, to give life to a world beset by astheneia, must be imaginative, resourceful and creative, continually finding ways to protect Earth’s health. Like Andrew (6.9), we admit the scantiness of the lifestyle changes we are only now beginning to make, compared with the vastness and complexity of the danger. Small lifestyle choices can have a significant cumulative effect, however, and they can train us in ‘ecological citizenship’.24 The dramatic impact of the scene where Jesus walks on the ‘sea’ (Jn 6.16-21) depends, as we have seen, on the audience’s appreciation of the ancient Israelite awe of the sea and apprehension lest its waters inundate the land. We used to regard this as a primitive, pre-scientific fear, but, as Bill McKibben writes, commenting on the belief that the Creator has set limits for the sea (Job 38.11), ‘We as a civilization are on the verge of changing the boundaries of the ocean, the place where the proud waves break.’25 The most ambitious goal set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, that of limiting global warming to 1.5˚C, may perhaps allow some low-lying islands and lands to survive. However, the 3.5˚C rise that will have occurred by the year 2100, if nations merely limit their efforts to their initial COP 21 pledges to reduce carbon emissions ‘could still submerge coastal cities and drive over half of all species to extinction’.26 This is an urgent call to Jesus’ disciples to agitate for more ambitious goals.

23. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. 200. 24. Laudato Si’, 211. 25. McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind, pp. 54–5. 26. J. Worland, ‘Degrees of Global Warming’, Time 186, No. 27–28 (2015), p. 6.

Chapter 9 A T THE F ESTIVAL OF T ABERNACLES

As Jesus’ day’s work in the garden of the Earth progresses, the hostility against him increases to the point that going to Jerusalem for the Festival of Tabernacles (NRSV: Booths) is a risk. There are people there seeking to kill him (Jn 7.1). He knows that he still has some hours of daylight left – ‘My time (Gk, kairos: an exact or critical time, an opportunity) has not yet come’ (7.6), but in view of the danger he decides to ‘go up’ – the conventional expression for making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Chapter 5, §1) – but privately, rather than as part of a pilgrim caravan. Our Earth-conscious reading of John 7 will benefit from a prior look at the festival and what it involved.

9. §1 You shall live in booths for seven days (Lev. 23.42) The week-long autumn festival known as Tabernacles (Deut. 16.13-15) was the  most joyful of the temple feasts. It celebrated the ingathering of the last of  the year’s wheat and the harvesting of the grapes and olives that had ripened in the summer sun. It also marked the ending of the dry season and the onset of the precipitation that Israel, ‘a land … watered by rain from the sky’, depended on so precariously (Deut. 11.10-12. Chapter 4, §2). The feast was named for the booths, temporary shelters originally built in the vineyards for the grape pickers. As the festival expanded beyond its agricultural origins into a remembrance of the forty-year wilderness journey, the booths came to represent the tents of the Israelites during their desert wanderings. The biblical instructions for the festival name the various trees from which branches were cut to make the booths: ‘palm trees and willows of the brook’ (Lev. 23.40), ‘olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm and other leafy trees’ (Neh. 8.15). People set up their booths on rooftops, in courtyards, in the courts of the temple and in the squares of the city and lived in them for the duration of the festival (8.16). ‘Ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm’ were carried in processions with singing as part of the festival (2 Macc. 10.6-8; Ps. 118.27). Ecologically minded readers might query the practice of stripping branches from trees. It was autumn time, however, when pruning was part of Earth care (Gk, geōrgia: farm work, cultivation; from gē: land and ergon:

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work; Jn 15.2; Chapter 14, §2). It may well be that this seasonal task partly explains the origins of these ritual customs. The rites conducted in the temple included libations of water. Later Jewish sources recall that early each morning of the feast priests went to the Pool of Siloam, accompanied by a large entourage, and filled a golden vessel with water. To the accompaniment of the temple choir singing, ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’ (Isa. 12.3), they then poured the water, together with a jug of wine, into the ground beneath the temple (t. Sukkah 4.9) to mingle with the subterranean waters (Chapter 1, §4). The Pool of Siloam (Shiloah in Isa. 8.6) is important for our reading of the Fourth Gospel because Jesus instructs the blind man to wash there (Jn 9.7). It was fed by the Gihon spring in the valley east of the City of David, originally Jerusalem’s principal water supply (supplemented by runoff stored in cisterns), ‘a spring that could provide 20 litres of water per person per day for 10,000 people’.1 To ensure access to water at a protected position within the city, Hezekiah (ruled ca. 715-687 BCE) had excavated a 533-metre-long conduit through the limestone (2 Kgs 20.20; Sir. 48.17) to channel the spring’s water into the Pool of Siloam, part of a system of pools functioning as settling basins and conserving water that would otherwise have drained off into the Kidron valley (2 Kgs. 18.17; Isa. 7.3; 22.9-11; 36.2). The Pool of Siloam and the King’s Pool seem to be alternative names for the same reservoir, believed to have been built by King Hezekiah.2 By the time of Jesus, the city’s water supply had been further enhanced by the Hasmoneans and then by Herod the Great who developed an aqueduct system bringing water from as far away as the Pools of Solomon near Bethlehem.3 The water in the Pool of Siloam, however, retained its special significance as ‘living water’ from the Gihon spring which itself had powerful symbolic import as the source of ‘a river whose streams make glad the city of God’ (Ps. 46.4; Chapter 1, §3). In the delightfully vague ‘geography’ of Gen. 2.10-14, a writer who obviously regards Jerusalem as the centre of the Earth names the Gihon as one of the four rivers that flow out of paradise (Gen. 2.13). As we saw in our discussion of the temple (Chapter 1, §4 and §7), the description in Ezekiel 47 of the river of water issuing from the sanctuary of the temple and bringing life wherever it flowed builds on this symbolic cartography. So while the water libations at Tabernacles had their origin in ancient rituals of prayer for rain (Zech. 14.17), for Jews of Jesus’ time they symbolized the ‘living waters’ that would flow out from Jerusalem ‘on that day’ when God’s reign would extend to all the Earth (Zech. 14.8). In view of the Fourth Evangelist’s interest in Jesus’ messianic credentials (Jn 20.31), it is significant that the Gihon spring had strong associations with the kings of Judah. It seems that in the ancient enthronement rites ‘a symbolic drink, a cup of life and salvation’ was given to the new king from the Gihon source (1 Kgs 1.38;

1. C. N. Raphael, ‘Geography and the Bible (Palestine)’, in ABD II, pp. 964–77 (972). 2. W. H. Mare, ‘King’s Pool’, in ABD IV, p. 49. 3. Oleson, ‘Water Works’, pp. 884–8.

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Ps. 110.7).4 Archaeological exploration has shown that openings in a channel running from the Gihon along the west side of the Kidron Valley provided irrigation for the ‘King’s Garden’ on the floor of the valley.5 The Pool of Siloam, the King’s Pool, was positioned and designed so that its overflow would supply additional water to the royal ‘paradise’.6 The Gihon, therefore, generated the transformative effect of ‘living water’ on the garden (Chapter 1, §2). All of this helps us to understand that when a sudden flow of water gushes out of the uplifted Jesus’ pierced side (Jn 19.34-35) a fountain is being opened for the House of David (Zech. 13.1; Chapter 16, §2).

9. §2 You give them drink from the river of your delights (Ps. 36.8) All pilgrims underwent immersion in water before entering the temple precinct. This is taken for granted in the gospel because ritual purification before entry into a sacred place was so common, not just in Jerusalem, but in the Greco-Roman world generally.7 A papyrus fragment dated to the second century CE tells a story about the high priest challenging Jesus as to whether he and his disciples had bathed, washed their feet and changed their clothes before entering the temple precinct. This assumes that temple officials monitored the pilgrims’ observance of the purity requirements for admission to the temple.8 It is inconceivable that pilgrims would not also have drunk water to refresh themselves. One of the psalms certainly suggests that they did. [All people] feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light. (Ps. 36.8-9)

Apparently, Herod’s building works included ‘great vaulted reservoirs built into the platform of the temple at Jerusalem [on an] imperial scale and finish’9 Archaeological excavations in the area surrounding the temple have uncovered numerous mikvaoth. So as the pilgrims immersed themselves and drank the refreshing water they must surely have believed that they were bathing in and

4. J. Eaton, The Psalms: A Historical and Spiritual Commentary with an Introduction and New Translation (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 286. 5. W. H. Mare, ‘Siloam, Pool of ’, in ABD VI, pp. 24–6 (25) and ‘King’s Garden’, in ABD IV, p. 48. 6. Mare, ‘King’s Pool’, p. 49. 7. Freyne, ‘Jewish Immersion’, p. 236. 8. F. Bovon, ‘Fragment Oxyrhynchus 840, Fragment of a Lost Gospel, Witness of an Early Christian Controversy over Purity’, JBL 119 (2000), pp. 705–28. 9. Oleson, ‘Water Works’, p. 888.

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drinking from the very source of all Earth’s waters, from waters that flowed directly from God.

9. §3 Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water (Jn 7.38) On the last day of the Festival of Tabernacles (Jn 7.37), Jesus sees all the pilgrims immersing themselves in the various pools around the temple, cupping their hands to drink the water flowing into the pools or perhaps crowding around the decorative water spouts that would doubtlessly have featured in Herod’s GrecoRoman-style refurbishment of the temple precinct. This is an obvious narrative cue for him to cry out: ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.’ Jesus then quotes a Scripture passage that he claims will be fulfilled in the experience of those who respond to his invitation. In spite of the Evangelist’s formula of quotation –‘as the Scripture has said’ – the words, ‘Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water’ (7.38 NRSV alternative translation), do not cite accurately any single biblical passage. There is also an ambiguity in the sentence itself, compounded by the absence of punctuation marks in ancient manuscripts, making it difficult to know whether the ‘him’ (from whom the waters flow) refers to Jesus or to the believer. The description of the disciple Thomas, in the gospel attributed to him, as one who has become drunk from the bubbling spring which Jesus has measured out is instructive (Gos.Thom. 13). This Earth-conscious reading follows most recent scholars in applying the image of the inner spring to Jesus, with the acknowledgement that it can apply to the believer in a derived sense, on the basis of the Johannine idea that believers do what Jesus does.10 The scriptural passage that comes nearest verbally to Jesus’ quotation is part of a psalmist’s retelling of the story of the water-flowing desert rock, in particular, the underlined words: [God] made streams come out of the rock, and caused waters to flow down like rivers. … [yet they spoke against God saying,] Even though he struck the rock so that water gushed out and torrents overflowed, can he also give bread, or provide meat for his people? (Ps. 78.16.20)

This accounts for most of the quotation, especially since another psalm praises God who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water. (Ps. 114.8)

10. For a detailed and more fully referenced discussion of this quotation, see DalyDenton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 144–61.

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However, Jesus’ reference to his ‘belly’ (Gk, koilia: the digestive tract, the internal organs or the womb as in Jn 3.4) remains to be elucidated. Various explanations have been proposed, some drawing effectively on the exegetical techniques of the time as found in Hillel’s middoth.11 However, there is perhaps the risk that we may credit the Evangelist with far more access to written sources than was probably the case. Whatever about textual complexities, it is sufficient for our purposes here to understand that Jesus’ quotation refers to the story of the water-flowing rock (Exod. 17.1-7; Num. 20.2-13), referred to in Deut. 8.15 RSV as ‘the flinty (Gk, akrotomos: cut off, sharp) rock’. Philo, whose allegorization of the Scriptures gives us valuable insights into their interpretation in the Hellenized Judaism of the first century CE Diaspora, may be of some help. For Philo, God makes the water of divine Wisdom flow from the flinty (akrotomos) rock to satisfy thirsty souls (Alleg. Interp. 2.21.86). Elsewhere Philo explains that God ‘uses the word “rock” to express the solid and indestructible wisdom of God which feeds and nurses and rears to sturdiness all who yearn after imperishable substance’ (Worse. 115-118). The allusion here is to the biblical portrayals of Wisdom as a female figure and, for Philo, as a nursing mother from whom people drink deeply with delight, as from Jerusalem’s consoling breast (Isa. 66.11). We noted above how, according to a near contemporary of the Evangelist, ‘the ever-flowing fountains, formed both for enjoyment and health, furnish without fail their breasts for the life of humankind’ (1 Clem. 20). We also saw that Josephus and Philo make similar comparisons (Chapter 6, §3). The familiarity of this maternal imagery for springs in the Evangelist’s milieu may support the suggestion that, as well as being a water source from which believers drink, Jesus’ koilia is also a womb and the waters flowing from it are birth waters. This would mean that the parental love for the world, revealed in the sending of Jesus (Jn 3.16), includes that motherliness (Heb., rah․amîm: compassion, the emotions, the womb)  that must always nuance our use of the metaphor ‘Father’ for God (Chapter 7, §3). We will return to this when discussing other Johannine birth imagery (Chapter 14, §5). Without getting bogged down in the question of influences and the direction in which they may have flowed, it is worth noting that for the second-century apologist Justin, Jesus is ‘the spring of living water which gushed forth from God’ (Dial. 69; see also Dial. 120). Christians see Jesus as ‘the good Rock, which causes living water to burst forth for the hearts of those who by him have loved the Father of all, and which gives those who are willing to drink of it the water of life’ (Dial. 114). Christians have been ‘quarried from the bowels (koilia) of Christ’ (1 Apol. 135). This rather strangely mixed metaphor makes sense only if Justin is comparing Jesus with the water-flowing desert rock of Exod. 17.6.12

11. M. J. J. Menken, ‘The Origin of the Old Testament Quotation in John 7:38’, NovT 38 (1996), pp. 160–75. 12. For a more detailed study of Justin’s view of Jesus as the water-flowing rock, see DalyDenton, ‘Water in the Eucharistic Cup’, pp. 365–7.

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We have already encountered water drinking as a symbol for the acceptance of Jesus in faith (Jn 4.7-15) and we will meet it again when living waters flow from the temple of Jesus’ body (2.21) cleaved open by a Roman soldier (19.34). In each of these scenes the major underlying biblical typology – the story of the water-flowing desert rock (Exod. 17.6, Num. 20.11) – is combined with the belief that the temple was the source of life-giving water for the whole Earth. There are strong indications in the gospel that the Evangelist is tapping into a midrashic expansion of the biblical narrative according to which the water-flowing rock travelled with the people throughout the forty-year desert journey, coming to rest at the final destination of the Exodus, the site where the temple would eventually be built (Exod. 15.17). In some versions, the rock becomes the foundation of the holy of holies; in others, the site of the altar of sacrifice.13 This legend is found in Pseudo-Philo (LAB 10.7). Paul too shows his familiarity with it and takes it in a Christological direction: I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. (1 Cor. 10.1-4)

In view of our finding that an early generation of Johannine believers celebrated a bread and water Eucharist (Chapter 6, §5), it is instructive that the spiritual food and spiritual drink are not bread and wine, but bread and water. For Paul, as for the Fourth Evangelist, Jesus renews the prodigies of the Exodus by providing the food and drink of which the manna and the water from the rock were a foreshadowing.14

9. §4 He said this about the Spirit (Jn 7.39) The Evangelist explains that when Jesus invited anyone who thirsted to come and drink he was speaking about the Spirit. In terms of the narrative chronology, the Spirit is not yet given because Jesus is not yet glorified (Jn 7.39). Within the logic of the gospel’s spiral structure, however, this brings us back to Jesus’ comment on the negative reaction to his claim to be the bread that came down from heaven – ‘It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life’ (6.63) – and then further back to his assertion to the Samaritan woman – ‘God is spirit, and those who worship [God] must worship in spirit and truth’ (4.24). Retracing more of the spiral, we recall birth ‘by water and the spirit’

13. M. Barker, The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem (London: SPCK, 1991), p. 18. 14. For a more detailed treatment of Jn 7.38-39, see Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 144–61.

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in Jesus’ conversation with a perplexed Nicodemus (3.5-8), and John’s recognition of Jesus as the one on whom the Spirit rests, enabling him to testify that Jesus is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit (1.33). The theme of the Spirit will resurface in the Last Discourse (Chapter 13, §8), in the subtle suggestion that Jesus’ dying breath is a handing over of the Spirit (19.30; Chapter 15, §7), in the account of the flow of water from his pierced side (19.34; Chapter 16, §2) and when the risen Jesus breathes the breath of life into his disciples, just as the Creator once did into the clay figure of Adam (20.22; Gen. 2.7; Chapter 15, §7). There have already been several moments in the gospel where the Earth element of air has revealed something of the divine Spirit: air moving in wind, air outbreathed in speech, wafting a dove down from the skies (Jn 1.32), an unexpected gust that seems to come from nowhere, a breeze blowing where it will, always elusive (3.8). In this scene at the Feast of Tabernacles another Earth element rises to the challenge of revealing features of the divine Spirit: water. A saying attributed to a third-century rabbi, Joshua ben Levi, explains that the ritual of drawing water during Tabernacles was actually a drawing out of the Holy Spirit (y. Sukkah 5.1 [55a]. The rabbi knew, of course, that the prophets frequently use water – whether drawn from a well or dispensed bountifully from the skies – as an analogy for the Spirit, an effective image in a climate where drought was common and water conservation was vital. As the Fourth Evangelist says, God’s gift of the Spirit is not measured out (Jn 3.34). The outpouring of the divine Spirit is like ‘water on the thirsty land’ (Isa. 44.3), a blessing not restricted to human beings, but poured out ‘on all flesh’ (Joel 2.28), bringing that sense of renewal, refreshment and cleansing that rain showers bring to everything that lives – plant, animal and human – in a dry, hot and dusty environment (Ezek. 36.25-26). So in a future age of righteousness and justice, as described in Isa. 32.15, ‘a spirit from on high is poured out, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field (Heb., carmel: garden, vineyard, orchard), and the fruitful field is deemed a forest (Heb., ya‘r: grove, thicket, wood), a veritable ‘paradise’ (Neh. 2.8; Chapter 1, §3). As Nicholas Lash remarks, ‘Throughout both Testaments, at the heart of talk of God as Spirit (and of the world as effect of, and as affected by, the Spirit that is God) the contrast drawn is that between not-life, or lesser life, or life gone wrong, and life: true life, real life, God’s life and all creation’s life in God.’15

9. §5 I am the Light of the world (Jn 8.12) In view of the fact that the story of the woman caught in adultery (Jn 7.53-58.11) was not originally part of the gospel, it is possible that Jesus’ claim to be the light of the world is his answer to the authorities’ dismissive remarks on the basis of his Galilean origins (7.52). If they had searched the Scriptures more assiduously

15. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 85.

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(5.39), they would have found that it was in Galilee that ‘the people who walked in darkness saw a great light’ (Isa. 9.1-2). The rites for the Festival of Tabernacles also included night illumination of the temple courts. The temple ablaze with light recalled the glory of God coming to the newly built first temple when Solomon dedicated it during the seven-day-long ‘feast of the seventh month’ (1 Kgs 8.2, 11, 64-66; 2 Chr. 5.3). By the time of Jesus, this memory had been integrated with a post-exilic interpretation of the feast more focused on the booths (Neh. 8.13-18). The night-time illuminations anticipated symbolically the dawning of the end time when there would be no more need for the sun or the moon, because God would be the light (Zech. 14.7; see Rev. 22.5). As we have seen, light was an important temple symbol. The menorah, a ‘tree’ both of light and of life was one of the temple’s Edenic features (Chapter 1, §4). The shining of the light of the divine face on Israel (Num. 6.25; Ps. 4.6) was symbolized by lights kept burning permanently in the temple day and night, their radiance manifesting the divine presence. Pseudo-Philo preserves a tradition that twelve precious stones, kept in the holy of holies, radiated a light like that of the sun which diffused over all the Earth (LAB 26.15). The prominence of both water and light in biblical expressions of Israel’s beliefs about the temple’s meaning is seen in the psalmist’s account of the experience of pilgrims, drinking from the abundant fountain of life and being bathed with the light of the divine presence (Ps. 36.8-9, cited in §2 above). It is against this background, and still within a Tabernacles context, that Jesus says, ‘I am the light of the world’ (Jn 8.12). Again, if we retrace our journey back along the gospel’s spiral path, we come back to the light of divine Wisdom, ‘light for the eyes’ (Bar. 3.14), shining down the years in the darkened world (Jn 1.4-5), in  ‘a  continuous illumination that finally flames out in the incarnation of the Logos’16 (Chapter 2, §4–§5). The light is welcomed by some and refused by others who prefer the cover of darkness for their evil deeds (1.11-13; 3.19-21). As a result of their choice, they stumble and lose sight of where they are going (11.10; 12.35). When the daylight wanes and Jesus’ day’s work draws to a close (11.9), he will sum up what he has achieved. ‘I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness’ (12.46). His giving of sight to the man born blind will be the sign that he will accomplish this fully in the events of ‘the hour’. The gospel invites its audience to think about what Jesus calls ‘the light of this world’ (Jn 11.9). For the ancients, light was as much an entity as water. That is why the first biblical creation narrative can present the creation of light as prior to and independent of the creation of the sun on the fourth day (Gen. 1.3, 14-19). We today see the world in the light of the sun, but the ancients thought that the sun was put into the firmament by God to govern or regulate the amount of celestial light that would be allowed to shine through holes or membranes in the firmament

16. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, p. 209.

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at different times of the day and the year.17 The divine command, ‘Let there be light,’ inaugurates the creation. Light is ‘life’ (Jn 1.4). To see or to walk in ‘the light of life’ is to have been rescued from the danger of death (Job 33.30; Ps. 56.13). The ‘light of this world’ – as perceived by people with little or no access to artificial light – is also the opportunity for them to act while they can. For Jesus’ disciples, the light permits them to do their day’s work, as Jesus did (Ps. 104.23; Chapter 6, §2), to become co-creators, completely given, as he was, ‘for the life of the world’ (Jn 6.51). In the ‘black and white’ ambience of the Fourth Gospel, there is no neutral middle way. To refuse the light is, as we will now see, to be on the side of darkness.

9. §6 To belong to the house (Jn 8.35) All through the narrative sequence set during the Feast of Tabernacles there is a thread of debate: discussion among the people gathered in Jerusalem for the feast and increasingly acrimonious arguments between Jesus and the religious elite, as represented by the chief priests and Pharisees (Jn 7.45), and even more bitter dispute with another group identified as ‘the Jews who had believed in him’ (8.31). This last group probably represents a faction engaged in a controversy with the gospel’s author. Jesus sets them on the offensive when he says, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’ (8.31-32). They take this as an insult. ‘We have never been slaves to anyone,’ they retort, even though they have been enslaved to several conquering powers and are currently under the heel of Rome. Jesus touches on a sensitive nerve here by contrasting their present status as a slave in the household with that of a son, the status that he himself enjoys in a unique way, but a status that is also their birthright as Israelites (Exod. 4.23; Hos. 11.1). To appreciate this dialogue, we need to keep in mind the disparity in status not only between slaves and sons, but also between freed persons and sons, and between daughters and sons in a typical household of the time. ‘We have one father, even God,’ they insist (Jn 8.41, RSV), yet Jesus tells them they are living in God’s household as slaves. The equation of sin with slavery and of wisdom (knowledge of the truth) with freedom is a commonplace in the popular Stoic philosophy of the Evangelist’s day and it is developed here in keeping with the Johannine conviction that sin is the refusal to accept that in Jesus God’s Wisdom is revealed and calls for a positive decision (16.8-9). A passage from an insightful essay on this scene by C.  H. Dodd points us towards a way of thinking about all of this in Earthconscious mode. The genius of the Fourth Evangelist has lifted the whole argument (especially in the closing verses, 42-47, where the characteristic marks of his authorship are

17. R. Hendel, note to Gen. 1.14-19 in The HarperCollins Study Bible (Rev. Ed. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), p. 6.

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strongest) to a level where its local and temporary aspects recede, and the issues are universal and radical: truth and reality, the death-desires that spring from the lie and bring incapacity to hear the Word, and, finally a man’s [sic] ultimate relation to God.18

For the Fourth Evangelist, human life is to be lived, not as people enslaved to various ‘addictions’, but in freedom as befits a son of God’s house. Obviously, we today would wish to speak of both sons and daughters of the house, but to appreciate the metaphor, we have to understand how patriarchal households were structured. The house that Jesus is speaking about is not some other-worldly place in a future realm. It is the Earth that we today are gradually learning to see as the home (Gk, oikos: house, household) that we belong to as members of an interconnected community of living beings. This understanding of our Earth home has given us the word ecology: discourse (Gk, logoi: words) about the relationships within our oikos.

9. §7 Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day (Jn 8.56) Much of the debate hinges on Jesus’ interlocutors’ claim that they are children of Abraham. Jesus argues that children should take after their father. Their determination to have Jesus killed shows that they bear no family resemblance to their so-called father. ‘Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day,’ argues Jesus, ‘He saw it and was glad’ (Jn 8.56). This could allude to Abraham’s laughter when he learnt that Sarah would bear him a child in old age (Gen. 17.17). However, in view of the Fourth Evangelist’s stress on Jesus’ heavenly origins, it is unlikely that the Johannine Jesus is referring here to his genealogical descent from Abraham. This saying probably picks up on beliefs known to us mainly from the Pseudepigrapha, that in the course of a heavenly journey after his death Abraham was granted knowledge of the future (Test. Abr. 10-15; 4 Ezra 3.13-14; 2 Baruch 4.2-4; Apoc. Abr. 9.6-7; 15.18-20; see also Lk. 16.22). The Evangelist’s use of an idiomatic expression, ‘to see my day’ has both the obvious meaning that Abraham was given privileged knowledge about the eventual coming of Jesus. However, it would seem that Abraham rejoiced when he learnt about ‘the day of the Lord’ that would turn out to be Jesus’ day, his day’s work in the garden of the Earth (Chapter 6, §2). Once again we find the Evangelist reminding the audience about the joy that the coming of Jesus brings (Chapter 3, §4). In an exceedingly harsh retort to ‘the Jews who had believed in him’, Jesus insists that, judging by their murderous intentions towards him, they are showing themselves to be children of the devil (Jn 8.42-44). Surprisingly, the entry of the devil into the argument opens up an interesting prospect for an Earth-conscious reading to explore. The Fourth Gospel is unique in including a claim that Jesus

18. Dodd, More New Testament Studies, p. 52.

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has a demon (7.20; 8.48; 10.20). It is common to explain this allegation in terms of ancient views concerning insanity, especially since in Jn 10.20 having a demon is coupled with being out of his mind (Gk, mainomai: to rage, be furious, be insane). However, this deserves closer examination, especially since Jesus casts the devil in a particular role: that of a murderer (8.44). Who exactly is the devil? The Greek ho diabolos translates ‘the satan’, a judicial term in Hebrew meaning an accuser, a slanderer, a calumniator, an adversary. In the Hebrew Bible a celestial being called the satan is the accuser of Joshua (Zech. 3.1); he undermines Job (Job 1.6-12); he incites David to take a census (1 Chr. 21.1, although in 2 Sam. 24.1 God does!). The LXX translators chose the word diabolos, meaning slanderer, to translate ‘satan’ in view of this figure’s penchant for making false accusations and this is how the devil has become ‘the father of lies’ (Jn 8.44). The earliest known attestation to the later identification of ho diabolos with the Genesis serpent is found in Greek Solomon. ‘God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it’ (Wis. 2.23-24). This goes some way towards explaining Jesus’ claim that the devil ‘was a murderer from the beginning’ (Jn 8.44). In our discussion of the opening words of the gospel we noted that ‘the beginning’ covers the whole period from before creation began to the expulsion from Eden (Chapter 2, §3). So Jesus is alluding here to the lie told by the serpent – who has now mutated into the devil in the later reception of the primary history – ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of [the tree that is in the middle of the garden] your eyes will be opened and you will be like God’ (Gen. 3.4-5). Lying is the serpent’s nature, but his real role is to be a murderer, to cut Adam and Eve off from the life that they enjoy in paradise. Acting in character, the devil will enter into Judas to set the events leading to Jesus’ death in motion (Jn 13.2, 27). While the diabolos brought death to Adam and Eve with his lies, Jesus brings life with his truth (14.6). We might note also the reference to the dragon as ‘that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world’ in another Johannine work (Rev. 12.9) where, significantly, those on his side are called ‘the destroyers of the earth’ (11.18).

9. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) The Johannine Jesus speaks of doing the truth (Jn 3.21 RSV; see 1 Jn 1.6), testifying to the truth (5.33; 18.37), knowing the truth (8.32), telling the truth (8.40, 45-46; 16.7), belonging to – or more literally, existing from/out of – the truth (18.37), standing in the truth (8.44), being sanctified in the truth (17.17), being set free by the truth (8.32), being guided by the Spirit into all the truth (16.13), and of himself as ‘the truth’ (14.6). This challenges our use of misleading or inappropriate terms in our discourse about the ecological crisis. A blatant example of neither telling nor doing the truth is the use of the rhetoric of human rights to justify military interventions when the real reason has to do with the exploitation of natural resources. However, not speaking the truth can take more subtle forms:

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greenwashing, for example, whereby ‘the social and environmental responsibility of businesses often gets reduced to a series of marketing and image-enhancing measures’.19 Then there is the use of terms like ‘development’ – which can be a euphemism for industrialization. In Ireland, when people first heard about ‘global warming’ it actually sounded appealing. It conjured up visions of balmy summers and al fresco dining, pleasures that would normally be rather infrequent. In order to tell the truth, our terminology has had to progress from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’, and beyond that to ‘climate damage’ and ‘climate justice’. In fact, we now speak of ‘climate debt’. It is a matter of justice that the Global North, whose industrialization was resourced by the colonial enterprise and who is still the main destination for the products of the two-thirds world, should not only repay its debt but also make reparation by helping the South towards sustainable development with finance, technology transfer, market openings and economic mechanisms. Jesus, the forthright teller of the unwelcome truth (8.45) models for his followers the linguistic dimension of ecological responsibility: telling the truth by avoiding language that encourages complacency and denial. If the language we use suggests neutral or positive outcomes for actions that are actually unsustainable, then we will continue to behave unsustainably. Language use is critical to communicating scientific knowledge about environmental problems in a way that empowers people to take necessary actions for more sustainable lifestyles.20

Jesus confronts people who think they are free, but who are actually enslaved (Jn 8.31-36). Is it possible that we are slaves of ecological sin – what Pope Francis, citing the ‘Green Patriarch’ Bartholomew calls ‘our sins against creation’?21 Nicholas Lash diagnoses this servitude as ‘our impotence, our victimhood to forces and to structures outside our control, our slavery to some malign taskmaster – fate, “the market,” call it what we will – at whose throne we kneel’.22 We are supposed to be sons and daughters who have the freedom of the oikos, our common home. The prevailing consumer culture of the Global North has socialized us into an addictive way of living that strips us of our freedom to live as children of God. In Ivone Gebara’s view, the root of our ‘slavery’ is an understanding of human autonomy that ‘fails to acknowledge our intimate bond with Earth and the entire cosmos. It insists on a radical divide between the Creator, rational humans and the irrational “rest” of creation.’ Gebara continues, ‘It is an accomplice to the present

19. Laudato Si’, par. 194. 20. J. Canning, ‘Translating Words into Action and Action into Words: Sustainability in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies Curricula’, in Sustainability Education: Perspectives and Practice across Higher Education (ed. P. Jones, D. Selby and S. Sterling; Abingdon: Earthscan, 2010), pp. 295–312 (299–300). 21. Laudato Si’, par. 11. 22. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 108.

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situation of destruction. Its many casualties include women, the marginal poor and the ecosystem.’23 And this brings us to the increasing incidence of slavery (without inverted commas) worldwide. According to the findings of a Vatican-sponsored international workshop held in 2015 to explore the link between modern slavery and climate change, ‘As a matter of fact, global warming is one of the causes of poverty and forced migration, which are breeding grounds for human trafficking, forced labour, prostitution and organ trafficking.’24 Jesus promises his disciples, ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’ (Jn 8.32), and ‘If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed’ (8.36). This is the gift they are sent to share.

23. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, p. 57. 24. The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, ‘Modern Slavery and Climate Change: The Commitment of the Cities’ (21 July 2015). Cited from http://www.pass.va/content/ scienzesociali/en/events/2014-18/mayors.html (accessed 05 January 2016).

Chapter 10 T HE G OOD S HEPHERD

Jesus is still at the seven-day festival of Tabernacles, eating and sleeping with his disciples in a booth made of leafy branches somewhere in the vicinity of the temple. This is the ongoing context for his giving of sight to the man born blind and the subsequent ‘Shepherd Discourse’. It is important not to be misled by the chapter divisions in our Bibles (first devised in the thirteenth century). John 10 is a case in point. Jesus’ contrast between a shepherd and a thief is his judgement on the negative reaction to his carrying out of God’s Sabbath work (Chapter 7,  §5) by giving sight to the man blind from birth (Jn 9.1-7). The connection of the ‘Shepherd Discourse’ (10.1-18) with this healing is sustained until the point where the bystanders eventually divide into those who think Jesus has a demon and those who ask, ‘Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?’ (10.21), and even beyond that to a further instance of shepherding imagery, building up to Jesus’ provocative declaration, ‘The Father and I are one’ (10.26-30).

10. §1 A man blind from birth (Jn 9.1) With the same intentionality with which he saw the man lying by the pool of Bethzatha (Jn 5.6), Jesus sees a man blind from birth. ‘Night is coming when no one can work’ (9.4-5). Jesus’ day’s work will last only as long as he is in the world, shining as its light (Chapter 6, §2), so he is determined to be the light of the world for this man. As a ‘sign’ of this he mixes his saliva with the dust of the Earth and anoints the man’s eyes with the resulting clay (Gk, pēlos: moistened earth of a clay consistency; NRSV, mud). Clay has strong creational overtones. God forms Adam out of the dust (LXX Gk, chous: soil, dust) of the Earth (Gk: gē, land, earth), that would presumably have required moistening (Gen. 2.7). The combination of spittle and clay occurs in some Dead Sea Scroll passages referring to creation and, in fact this combination is found in ancient Near-Eastern creation myths.1 Several biblical passages speak of the Creator as a potter modelling the human figure in

1. D. Frayer-Griggs, ‘Spittle, Clay and Creation in John 9:6 and Some Dead Sea Scrolls’, JBL 132, 3 (2013), pp. 659–70.

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clay (LXX: pēlos; Isa. 45.9; Job 10.9). In LXX Ps. 17.42 (Ps. 18.42; 2 Sam. 22.43) pēlos is the mud or mire of the street, corresponding in the poetic parallelism to chous, the dust. The detail about Jesus spitting on the ground to make the pēlos would be typical of an ancient folk healer. There were popular beliefs in the healing power of saliva, especially that of a person with special powers.2 Jesus then tells the man to go and wash in the Pool of Siloam, a command with strong echoes of Elisha’s command to Naaman to wash in the Jordan (2 Kgs 5.10). As this resulted in a kind of rebirth for Naaman, in which his flesh became ‘like the flesh of a little child’ (5.14 RSV), the immersion in Siloam will be a rebirth for the man born blind. An allusion to initiation into the community of Jesus believers by a ritual immersion rite symbolizing rebirth by water and the Spirit (Jn 3.5) is possible here. The verb epechrisen (Gk, chriō: anoint) used for Jesus’ action of spreading the clay on the man’s eyes may strengthen the case for this allusion because an anointing ritual followed baptism in ‘living water’ (Did. 7.2), thereby making the initiate a christos, an anointed one (Ap. Trad. 21). The Evangelist provides an etymology for Siloam for which various explanations have been proposed. Whatever its source, apestalmenos, a cognate of apostolos, meaning someone sent with a message, is used of John (1.6; 3.28), of Jesus himself (passim) and of believers in Jesus (13.16), all cases of divine agency through which God’s intentions for the creation are realized. The man goes to this pool that is suffused with all the symbolic significance of its source, the Gihon Spring (Chapter 1, §3; Chapter 9,  §1). He washes and returns seeing. ‘The spittle, the dust, the physical touch, and the waters of Siloam work together as primal elements to give the man a sight he has never possessed.’3 For our Earth-conscious reading we will focus on two aspects of this story.

10. §2 He is of age (Jn 9.21) First, there is the man’s progression from being one of society’s ‘dispensables’, so faceless that people were not even sure if they could recognize him (Jn 9.8-9), to being a spirited character prepared to stand up to the authorities and even to challenge their judgement of Jesus. Thomas L. Brodie sees in the story an evocation of ‘the complex process whereby a person is created, comes to birth, grows up and matures’.4 As the story opens, the man is like an infant with nothing to say, sitting as if unable to walk, dependent on others for alms. When asked where his healer is, all he can say is ‘I do not know’ (9.12). As the drama unfolds, however, his utterances become more confident. Hearing the debate about whether Jesus is ‘from God’ or ‘a sinner’, he ventures an opinion, ‘He is a prophet’ (9.17). His timid

2. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, p. 170. 3. D. Lee, ‘The Gospel of John and the Five Senses’, JBL 129 (2010), pp. 115–27 (124). 4. T. L. Brodie, The Gospel According to John: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 346–7.

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parents, attempting to distance themselves from their son’s positive evaluation of Jesus, declare that he is ‘of age’ and can speak for himself (9.21). He has hēlikia, they say. This is maturity, with an implication that he is in the prime of life and, according to the ancient understanding of human reproduction (Chapter 7, §3), capable of producing new life (compare Heb. 11.11 where Sarah is beyond the kairos hēlikias). By the end of the scene, this formerly disempowered character has found the courage to interrogate his social and religious ‘betters’ (Jn 9.27) and to question their presumption that Jesus could not possibly be ‘from God’. At the beginning of this scene, Jesus has said to his disciples, ‘We must work the works of him who sent me’ (Jn 9.4). The pronoun ‘we’ draws the believing audience into the story. It is for them to do the works of the enabling Creator along the lines of the paradigm presented in this story. The Creator’s desire is for every ‘emerging person’ – to use Brodie’s description of the man born blind5 – and every living thing in this emerging world of ours to ‘have life and have it abundantly’ (10.10). The story reminds the audience of their own rebirth through water and the Spirit (3.5), how this has opened their eyes, how they are commissioned to be themselves life-givers and how this may well require them to take a courageous stand in the face of hostility.

10. §3 To know Jesus Christ whom God has sent (Jn 17.3) The second aspect of this story that seems particularly fruitful for an Earthconscious reading is the treatment of an issue that has already surfaced several times in the gospel, that of knowledge and various characters’ unfounded confidence that they have it. From an initial enigmatic intimation by John to the emissaries sent to investigate him – ‘Among you stands one whom you do not know’ (Jn 1.26) – to this scene, the motif of knowledge is developed extensively, sometimes with consummate irony (6.42; 7.27). This is certainly the case with the claims to knowledge that the Pharisees make in this scene. They know that Jesus is not from God because he does not observe the Sabbath (9.16). ‘We know that this man is a sinner,’ they state (9.24). ‘We know that God has spoken through Moses,’ they declare (9.29), with the inference that God is certainly not speaking through ‘this fellow’ (Gk, ekeinos; this one). In fact, the one and only time that they are correct in their estimation of their knowledge is when they comment, ‘As for this man, we do not know where he comes from’ (9.29). They are blind to God’s showing of Godself in Jesus, and for the Fourth Evangelist, this is sin (8.24). But as Jesus says to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains’ (9.41). This brings us to the Johannine use of seeing, contrasted with blindness, as a metaphor for the knowledge that is true insight and can therefore be identified

5. Brodie, The Gospel According to John, p. 350.

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with faith – what the Evangelist calls ‘believing into’ Jesus (Chapter 8, §7). As Nicholas Lash explains, citing Augustine: ‘The way in which the Son sees the Father is simply by being the Son.’ And something similar is true of us, for we have been adopted as his friends or siblings. Moreover, to ‘see’ Jesus as the Christ, God’s Word incarnate, is not to gaze or gape at him, but to see the point: to know oneself called, in absolute dependence upon the mystery of God, to follow him.6

The man born blind models the process of coming to ‘see the point’ and being willing then to testify courageously to what he has seen, even if that means being thrown out (9.34). But even then, there is joy for him. His faith has brought him into a garden from which he will never be expelled (6.37; Chapter 8, §8).

10. §4 My servant David shall be their shepherd (Ezek. 34.23) Finding the man born blind who has been thrown out (Jn 9.35), Jesus enacts the divine shepherding of Israel. ‘As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep (Ezek. 34.12). This flags up the entire chapter 34 of Ezekiel as an important intertext for the discourses in John 10, not least because its critique of so-called shepherds who have no care for the sheep is clearly echoed in Jesus’ characterization of the supposed shepherds of his day as ‘thieves and bandits’ (Jn 10.8). Ezekiel 34 is also a rich resource for our Earth-conscious reading because of the detail it provides about the care of sheep in ancient Israel. The native sheep of Israel is the fat-tailed Awassi. … It is typically white with brown or black head and feet. Rams are usually horned, ewes hornless. … During winter and spring, sheep and goats graze on the rich grass produced by the rains. In summer and early autumn, they feed on weeds, as well as stubble left over from the harvest. Late autumn and early winter are seasons of shortage, during which sheep subsist on the fat stored in their tails.7

The shepherd’s work included finding good grazing, ensuring that the sheep did not wander, milking them, shearing them, protecting them from disease, caring for the sick or injured, breeding and lambing, and, above all, safeguarding them from predators and thieves. Lest, however, we paint an over-idyllic picture of shepherding, it did, of course, have another side: slaughter, skinning – that may well have provided the thongs of Jesus’ sandals (Jn 1.27) – and butchering. In portraying Jesus as a shepherd the Fourth Evangelist is weaving into the gospel a strand of the royal traditions that can be traced back to the first appearance

6. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 80, citing Augustine, The Trinity, 2, 3. 7. Firmage, ‘Zoology (Animal Profiles)’, pp. 1126–7.

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of David in the Bible as a young shepherd ‘keeping the sheep’ (1 Sam. 16.11, 19; 17.15). It is a topos of ancient Near Eastern monarchic ideology that kings are shepherds. Dio Chrysostom, to cite just one example, says that kings should care for their people as shepherds for sheep, not being banqueters at their expense.8 A king is expected to prove himself fit to rule during an initiatory period of battle with the wild beasts in a hostile wilderness or desert setting (Mk 1.13). Philo draws on this notion in his Life of Moses when describing the period that the young Moses spent as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian (Exod. 3.1). The chase of wild animals is a drilling ground for the general in fighting the enemy, and the care and supervision of tame animals is a schooling for the king in dealing with his subjects, and therefore kings are called ‘shepherds of their people’, not as a term of reproach, but as the highest honour. … The only perfect king … is one who is skilled in the knowledge of shepherding. (Moses 1.11.61)

Philo’s presentation of Moses as a king plays somewhat loose, of course, with the biblical tradition, but suits his purposes. In the Deuteronomistic history, the young David gives an account of his shepherding exploits, by way of assurance to Saul of his readiness and ability to fight Goliath in defence of the nation. Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. (1 Sam. 17.34-35)

The delightful irony of this is that the future king is giving the ineffectual king, whom he is about to replace, a presentation on his own royal credentials. Later in the story Jonathan will reproach Saul for his persecution of David, reminding him that ‘he took his life in his hand when he attacked the Philistine’ (19.5). The Septuagint uses here the verb tithēmi (put) to convey the idea of ‘putting one’s life on the line’ in exactly the way that we find it used in Jn 10.11 – ‘The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.’ This suggests an understanding of Jesus’ kingship as something that has to be nuanced to the point of complete subversion of the conventional notion of rule (Chapter 4, §5).

10. §5 I came that they may have life (Jn 10.10) The gospel is the work of someone familiar with the biblical penchant for portraying God in pastoral terms (e.g. Isa. 40.11; Ps. 78.52; 80.1). The imaging of God as a shepherd shaped the hope for Israel’s restoration into expectation of

8. Carter, John and Empire, p. 165, citing Dio Chrysostom, Kingship 1.15–16.

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a shepherd-king who would seek out God’s scattered flock, gather them in and make their life ‘like a watered garden’ so that they [would] never languish again (Jer. 31.10-14). This idyll flowed into the many-faceted messianism that informed the early Jesus movement. The Evangelist has woven various strands of this vision into a discourse consisting of three ‘parables’ (10.6. Gk, paroimia: a short figurative narrative, a figurative saying). For his first parable (Jn 10.1-6, 10), Jesus creates a night-time scenario within which to contrast a sheep rustler pretending to be a shepherd with the genuine shepherd whose voice the sheep recognize. What the gospel says has been borne out recently in research on the cognitive function of sheep by Cambridge neuroscientist Jenny Morton (studying neurodegeneration with a focus on Batten and Huntington’s diseases). She has been able to see, by measuring patterns of electrical activity across a sheep’s brain, that sheep are capable of recognizing their handlers, both visibly and by voice. In her experiments the sheep are initially trained to walk on a lead, but before long they will follow their handler without a lead, and will come when called.9 The attachment that develops between sheep and shepherd must have been a major factor in the development of shepherd imagery for God. Even the detail that a shepherd goes before the sheep (10.4) is found in the Scriptures (Ps. 80.1). For a re-reader of the gospel, the bond implied in Jesus’ reference to his sheep as ‘his own’ (Jn 10.3) carries intimations of ‘the hour’ (13.1), a theme on which the third parable will expand. At night several different flocks of sheep would be kept in a common enclosure, made of stone or of tangled bushes. A thief could then use the cover of darkness (Jn 3.20) to climb over the wall, instead of going through the gate which would be guarded. In the second parable (10.7-9), interpolated in the first, Jesus compares himself to the gate that allows the sheep to come inside the sheepfold for shelter and protection and then to leave it freely to find pasture. While the thief comes ‘to steal and kill’ the sheep, Jesus has come ‘that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (10.10). This saying, clearly belonging with the first parable, is frequently used as what has been called an ‘ecological “mantra”-text’.10 However, a convincing Earthconscious interpretation of it requires more than simply claiming that by ‘they’ Jesus or the Evangelist meant ‘all creatures’. If we take into account the whole saying in its context, we find that it is part of a contrast. ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (10.10). Jesus distinguishes between the shepherd – a pastoral figure in the true sense of the word – and the predatory thief, in other words, between a responsible ruler and a reckless despot (Chapter 4, §5). This is precisely the contrast that underlies those supremely ironic moments during the trial of Jesus when the people choose Barabbas the bandit (Gk, lēstēs: bandit, robber, rebel) over against Jesus (18.40)

9. See University of Cambridge, Research, http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/ counting-on-sheep (accessed 18 January 2016). 10. D. G. Horrell, C. Hunt and C. Southgate, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), p. 64.

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and when Pilate goads them into declaring that the Roman emperor, the epitome of exploitation and oppression, and not God, is their king (19.15). The connection between the story of the man born blind and this parable would seem to suggest that Jesus has the Pharisees in mind. However, he subsequently casts a broader group, ‘all who came before me’ in the role of thieves and bandits (Jn 10.8). As we saw in the opening scene of the gospel, where emissaries arrive to investigate John, the Evangelist is somewhat vague about the various parties in first century CE Jerusalem (Chapter 3, §1). There is also the probability that the narrative’s Pharisees are telling us more about emerging rabbinic Judaism in the Evangelist’s and the audience’s experience than about the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. In the world of the narrative Jesus engages in a wide-ranging critique of the ‘powers that be’ in Jerusalem (7.48). The priestly elite steal by temple tithing and all the transactions involved in the sacrificial system that have made the Father’s house into an oikos emporiou (2.16; Chapter 5, §3). Their privileged lifestyle – revealed in recent archaeological excavations of villas in the priestly quarter of Jerusalem – is the payback for their compliance with Rome. In fact, as Raymond F. Person’s ecological reading of Deuteronomy in this series shows, the city of Jerusalem itself has been a ‘kleptocracy’ ever since the building of the second temple and the centralization of the cult there.11 The scribes are mentioned only in the non-Johannine story of the accused woman (7.53-8.11), but would be taken for granted. These are the copyists and interpreters of the Torah who regard ordinary people who do not know the Law as accursed (7.49). The Pharisees steal people’s freedom to flourish by hemming them in with a rigid, literalist interpretation of the Law that is concerned with whether making clay is ‘work’ and misses the point of the Sabbath: to make people whole (7.23). Then there is the imperial imposition of taxes, tribute and rents, with unscrupulous officials collecting amounts far in excess of the Roman levy. A story told by Suetonius could, no doubt, apply to Roman Palestine. Apparently the Emperor Tiberius turned down a provincial governor’s petition for permission to increase taxes, stating that it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it.12

10. §6 The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (Jn 10.11) The third parable (Jn 10.11-18) contrasts the shepherd with ‘the hired hand’ who has no real care for the sheep (10.13). Here the focus is on the ‘hour’ when the shepherd’s love for the sheep that he calls ‘his own’ will be shown ‘to the end’ (13.1). Jesus identifies himself as the model shepherd (Gk. kalos, beautiful, good, fitting), the ideal of what a shepherd should be (10.11, 14): one who lays down his life for his sheep. This is not the synoptic understanding of Jesus’ death as ‘a

11. R. F. Person, Jr., Deuteronomy and Environmental Amnesia (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2014), p. 144. 12. Carter, John and Empire, p. 165, citing Suetonius, Tib. 32.

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ransom for many’ (Mk 10.45; Mt. 20.28). In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus’ death is revelatory. It finally shows who he is: ‘the Messiah, the Son of God’ (Jn 20.31). This third shepherd parable points to that and, like John’s recognition of God’s anointed when he saw the Spirit descending on him (1.32; Chapter 3, §5), this too is a moment when the shades of David in the Johannine portrayal of Jesus are unmistakable. Finally, on the subject of shepherding, we might note the risen Jesus’ threefold commission to Peter, ‘Feed my lambs … tend my sheep … feed my sheep’ (Jn  21.15-17). The Fourth Evangelist has been fairly scathing about Peter. The supposed low status of those who provoke him into disassociating himself from Jesus – a serving maid, a crowd and a slave – brings out the cowardice of his denial (18.17, 25-27).13 It is only in this gospel that Peter is identified as the one disciple who resorted to violence at Jesus’ arrest (Jn 18.10). The later addition of John 21 seems at least partially motivated by a desire to rehabilitate Peter by giving him a narrative opportunity to purge his threefold denial. It is only here that Jesus speaks of his lambs (Gk, arnion: lamb). Three different words for ‘lamb’ are used in the New Testament: arēn found only in Lk. 10.3, amnos used for ‘the Lamb of God’ (Jn 1.29, 36) and arnion a diminutive of arēn used here and passim in Revelation for the victorious Lamb that symbolizes the exalted Jesus. The reference to lambs in Jn 21.15 may be intended to draw attention to the plight of those in particular need of pastoral care. In the Scriptures, the lamb does appear as an image of vulnerability (Isa. 53.7; Jer 11.19). The divine shepherd’s comforting of Jerusalem includes gathering the lambs in his arms and carrying them in his bosom (Isa. 40.11). So Jesus’ commission to Peter to be a shepherd to his sheep (Jn 21.16; Gk, poimainō, tend, shepherd, rule) might perhaps be understood in light of the earliest commentary on the Fourth Gospel that insists that laying down one’s life for one another, following the example of the Good Shepherd, is a matter of seeing that a member of one’s community is in need and responding with practical help (1 Jn 3.16-17). As Earth-conscious readers, we can most certainly widen our sense of that community beyond an anthropocentric view.

10. §7 At the Festival of the Dedication (Jn 10.22) A new scene begins at Jn 10.22, still connected with the Shepherd Discourse, however. Jesus is at the Feast of Dedication (Heb., Hanukkah), an eight-day festival of light held in December, around the time of the winter solstice. It recalled the rededication of the temple in the time of Judas Maccabeus in 165 BCE (1. Macc. 13.51-52). At that time, the sanctuary’s ritual purity was restored after its desecration during a period of apostasy on the part of Jerusalem’s priestly elite and their retainers. Jesus pointedly continues his critique of the Jerusalem leadership in the hearing of their successors. The Greek name used in the gospel for this feast, Enkainia, meaning renewal

13. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, pp. 253–4.

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(Gk. kainos, renewed, renovated, made new) surely carries a subliminal message in a strand of the early Jesus movement where God is believed to be dwelling on Earth in Jesus, making all things new (Rev. 21.3-5). Jesus is walking in Solomon’s Portico, part of Herod’s Greek-style enhancement of the temple complex. Some see here an oblique comparison or contrast with popular philosophers: the Stoics, for example, who traced their philosophy back to Zeno’s teaching in Athens’ stoa poikilē, or the peripatetic philosophers, so called because of their founder Aristotle’s preference for walking while teaching. Hellenized Jews such as Philo did, after all, present Torah study to their gentile contemporaries as Jewish philosophy. As Earth-conscious readers, we note that it is winter (Jn 10.22). In the land of Israel seasonal variations take the form of wet and dry seasons. Winter showers occur when low-pressure storm tracks over Europe are displaced more southwards and then move eastward through to the Mediterranean.14 So winter suggests rain and the need for shelter under one of the covered walkways that surrounded the Court of the Gentiles on three sides. The fact that the word cheimōn, usually translated as ‘winter’, can also mean ‘storm’ may be one of the Evangelist’s dramatic touches. Storm clouds are most certainly gathering. For re-readers of the gospel, this chilling scene, where people take up stones – rubble from Herod’s building project, perhaps – to stone Jesus to death (10.31), is in bleak contrast with an upcoming scene where a man and a woman will meet in a garden (20.14), but that will not be until ‘the winter is past and the rain is over and gone’ (Song 2.11). We will focus now on a fourth shepherding parable that occurs in this scene. We should note first the forensic atmosphere. The Fourth Evangelist is dealing here with the charges brought against Jesus in the synoptic trial scenes – that he claims to be the Christ and that he says he is the Son of God (Mk 14.61-64; Mt. 26.63-64; Lk. 22.66-71). A group gathers around Jesus in Solomon’s Portico – encircling him menacingly, it would seem (Ps. 17.9; 22.12, 16; 118.10-12). They demand that he tell them clearly if he is the Christ. Jesus’ response is to speak in shepherd-king mode. ‘My sheep hear my voice,’ he says. ‘I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish’ (Jn 10.27). Then in words reminiscent of the young shepherd David keeping sheep for his father and protecting the lambs from lions and bears (1 Sam. 17.34-35), Jesus adds, ‘No one will snatch them out of my hand’ (Jn 10.28). The background here is the shepherd counting each sheep as it passed under his hand (Jer. 33.13). At a figurative level, however, the background is hereditary kingship where a king puts everything into the hand of his natural heir, his (oldest) son.15 Following from that, there is the idea that a king holds his kingdom – the land and all that lives in it: plants, animals and people – in his hand. So, for example, we read of ten tribes – clearly tribal territories – being torn from the hand of Solomon when the land of Israel was divided into two kingdoms (1 Kgs 11.29-31). Again we touch on the Israelite understanding of kingship as

14. Raphael, ‘Geography and the Bible’, p. 970. 15. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, pp. 321–3.

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shepherding done in the name of the true Shepherd of Israel (Ps. 80.1), the kind of care that reveals the divine ‘care-fulness’. Jesus brings this ideal to such a point of realization that his sheep know that they are cared for by the Father and, as Jesus promises, ‘No one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand’ (Jn 10.29-30 NRSV alternative translation). It is possible that the Evangelist’s thought was shaped, even if unawares, by Psalm 95 where the Israelites are not only called ‘the sheep of [God’s] hand’ (Ps 95.7), but are also reminded that they are part of a wider world that is equally in God’s hand: the depths of the Earth, the mountains, the sea, the dry land (95.4-5). As Job has learnt from the animals, birds, plants and fish, ‘In [God’s] hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being’ (Job 12.7-10). Earlier in the gospel Jesus has spoken of everything (Gk, panta: all things) that the Father has given into the Son’s hand (Jn 3.35; see also 13.3, 17.2). As the Fourth Gospel continually insists, God’s love is not just for human beings, but for the whole kosmos (3.16; Chapter 5, §9).

10. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) The treatment of the issue of knowledge in John 9 challenges human arrogance. Ecology forces us to rethink knowledge. We think we know what we are doing when we make our technological interventions in the world, but so often there are unforeseen consequences for the Earth. As John Muir famously said, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’16 As Lorraine Code puts it, ecology is a matter of ‘learning to see the imperceptible’.17 Jesus calls his disciples to greater respect for mystery: the ‘way’ of the creation designed by Wisdom. The devastating cost of much of our technology, now being borne by the most vulnerable of earthkind, is showing how urgent and earnest our quest must be for an ecological knowing that is honest about how little we know. Each discovery reveals the magnitude of our ignorance; far from filling in the picture, these discoveries show us just how much remains to be learned. … It is as if we are standing in a cave holding a candle; the light barely penetrates the darkness and we have no idea where the cave walls are, let alone how many more caves there are beyond.18

Performative believing that is the doing of God’s work in the context of today’s ecological crisis is firstly a matter of acknowledging our blindness, ‘the carelessness

16. J. Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), p. 157. 17. L. Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 92. 18. D. Suzuki and A. O’Connell, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Allen & Unwin, 1997) pp. 19–20.

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which does not even notice the havoc which human beings wreak upon the planet and upon each other as they sleepwalk blindly through the world’.19 Jesus’ charge to his disciples, ‘Look around you and see’ (Jn 4.35) is a powerful ‘ecological commandment’ for today. As Code suggests, [Ecological thinking] urges ‘looking around’ in a manner akin to circumspection, both in a literal looking-around sense, aimed at seeing how things – particular things – are and are situated, and in a more diffuse and diverse sense of looking and listening well.20

‘Believing in(to) Jesus’ should be a dynamic, ongoing process of being brought from blindness to sight – insight into the ways of the life-loving energy of Wisdom at work in the creation, vision for the work of repairing the damage we have done in our ignorance of Wisdom’s ‘way’ and foresight that will help us to avoid such damage in the future. The Johannine shepherd parables contrast Jesus, the Good Shepherd with the thief (Jn 10.1) or the ‘hired hand’ who has no care for the sheep (10.13). Jesus’ disciples are to be pastoral people, carers who seek the flourishing of creation and not predatory thieves who ‘constantly consume and destroy, while others are not yet able to live in a way worthy of their human dignity’.21 Predation is, of course, a naturally occurring feature of life on Earth. However, in many postcolonial settings it has gone far beyond natural incidence because of human folly. In many countries native fauna and flora are threatened with extinction as a result of the introduction of foreign animals and invasive plants by colonizers. So, for example, to replant a native forest in order to restore the land’s natural biodiversity; to restore a wetland habitat or to create a wildlife sanctuary where indigenous animals and birds are protected from the predatory attentions of introduced species; to provide a safe place for the release of injured and threatened indigenous species; to reintroduce natural predators – all such initiatives are surely contemporary examples of people doing the work of God (Jn 6.28) in our world. Moreover, the wisdom we are learning as we grow in respect for creation’s ‘way’ will inevitably affect us by ‘committing us to changing direction for the present and the future’.22 The shepherd parables also challenge us about our care of the domesticated animals that we have conditioned to depend on us. It is becoming increasingly evident that animals are badly treated when mere profitability is the ‘bottom line’ for agriculture. Some hold that a vegetarian diet is the more ethical option, but it is possible to eat animals, as Jesus himself would have done, while still respecting

19. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 67. 20. Code, Ecological Thinking, p. 102. 21. Laudato Si’, par. 193. 22. Midgley, The Myths We Live by, p. 175 (Italics are the author’s).

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them and giving thanks to God for the gift of their life that nourishes ours. However, as Norman Wirzba warns, For this condition to be met it is crucial that these animals be accorded the attention and care that reflects God’s own self-giving care for creation. True animal husbandry – patterned after God the Good Shepherd – the sort that grows out of a caring bond between person and animal, can be a suitable context for the eating of meat.23

Believers in Jesus might well make their own some lines from a prayer popularly attributed to St Basil. While this attribution is probably spurious, the prayer does echo some motifs found in his Hexameron, a series of nine homilies on the six days of creation. O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers and sisters the animals, to whom you gave the Earth as their home in common with us. May we realize that they live not for us alone, but for themselves and for you, and that they love the sweetness of life even as we, and serve you better in their place than we in ours.24

23. Wirzba, Food & Faith, 136–7. 24. The Complete Book of Christian Prayer (New York: Continuum, 1996) p. 145 (adapted for gender inclusivity with archaic pronouns and verbal forms changed).

Chapter 11 F ROM B ETHANY TO J ERUSALEM

We will limit our exploration of the scene where Jesus raises Lazarus to two motifs that lend themselves to an Earth-conscious reading; the resurrection and the physical reality of death. We will, however, see more of Lazarus and his sisters later in this chapter when we consider Jesus’ return visit to Bethany (Jn 12.1-10).

11. §1 Let us go to Judea again (Jn 11.7) In his ‘safe house’ at ‘the place where John had been baptizing’ (Jn 10.40) in the territory across the Jordan, Jesus receives a message from his friends in Bethany of Judea, the sisters Mary and Martha, concerning their brother Lazarus. ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill’ (11.3). The meaning of Bethany – ‘House of the Poor’ – may be a hint that this is another case of astheneia being open to a figurative interpretation (Chapter 7, §2). Before going to Judea, Jesus delays two more days, until his friend actually dies, so that God’s works might be revealed in Lazarus, as they were in the case of the man born blind (9.3). The eventual outcome of the astheneia that is bringing Jesus so dangerously near Jerusalem (11.18) will be the glorification of the Son of God (11.4) – Johannine terminology for Jesus’ death – but now there is just enough time for Jesus to complete his ‘day’s work’ (Chapter 6, §2) before darkness sets in (11.9-10; 12.35-36). Jesus’ reference to the risk of stumbling while walking at night is a realistic touch. The roads and paths over which people travelled by foot in first-century Palestine would certainly have been narrow and stony. The Father, however, will not allow Jesus to stumble. He need not fear ‘the terror of the night’ (Ps. 91.5.12). He will complete his journey safely in ‘the light of this world’ (Jn 11.9).

11. §2 I am the resurrection (Jn 11.25) Jesus’ declaration to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (Jn 11.2526), elicits from her a profession of faith that is the equal of that attributed to Peter in the synoptic tradition (11.27; cf. Mt. 16.16). We should note firstly that some early manuscripts omit ‘and the life’. As we saw in our earlier discussion

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of all the different narratives evoked by the idea of the basileia (Chapter 5, §5), ‘the resurrection’ was one way of referring to the future aeon (Mk 12.23). The resurrection, understood as a life for the righteous with God beyond death, was one of various eschatological scenarios, depending where ‘seers’ were located on the continuum of Jewish diversity in the late Second Temple period. The Fourth Gospel is distinctive in its insistence that the resurrection happens for believers in Jesus here and now. They do not have to wait until a future aeon to experience it. ‘Eternal life’ (Gk, zōē: life; Gk, aiōnios: of-the-age; cognate of the Gk aiōn, age, epoch, aeon) lived now is the Johannine concept of the basileia. However, several additions, as we have seen (6.39, 40, 44, 54; Chapter 8, §9) and two redactional passages (5.29; 12.48) show that the community behind the gospel included people of a more futurist outlook. This should not surprise us because there was considerable variety with regard to ideas about resurrection in the late Second Temple period, and even more so after 70 CE. In the Johannine understanding, when Jesus becomes a person’s life, that person is reborn into a new form of existence: a qualitatively different way of living in the here-and-now of earthly life. This life, untouched by death, endures into the aeon (Jn 3.3, 5). Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is an intimation of this rebirth. Obviously Lazarus is brought back to a life that will eventually end with his death, so we might ask how this can be a sign of ‘eternal life’. Ernst Haenchen offers an effective analogy that helps to clarify the role of Jesus’ ‘signs’ generally. Lazarus’ transition from death to earthly life is ‘an indicator’ of what the resurrection means. However, ‘Turning on the indicator is not the same thing as going around the corner.’1 It is also helpful to remember that Jewish ideas about the resurrection stemmed largely from Daniel’s scenario where ‘those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (Dan. 12.2). This understanding of resurrection linked it with the idea of a final judgement. The ‘futurist’ redactors responsible for Jn 12.48 held that on the last day, Jesus’ word would be the judge of those who had rejected him. In contrast, the Evangelist insists that the judgement happens in the present, as people decide whether or not to accept Jesus (Jn 3.19). They live now with what they have chosen. In a narrative anticipation of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus says that the hour is coming when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and live. But, speaking as the Risen One addressing the community, he nuances the saying. That hour is now! (5.24-25). Lazarus in his tomb hears Jesus’ voice and awakens to life. Similarly, when the man at Bethzatha hears Jesus’ command to rise up (5.8), or when the blind man hears Jesus’ instruction to go and wash, that is their resurrection (5.21). A passage from the Gospel of Philip – a third-century work that has some commonalities with Johannine thought – adds further light. ‘People who say they will first die and then rise are wrong. If they do not receive

1. E. Haenchen, John: A Commentary on the Gospel of John (2 vols. trans. R. R. Funk; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), II, p. 64.

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the resurrection first, while they are alive, they will receive nothing when they die’ (Gos. Phil. 73).2 Thus the Johannine understanding of ‘the resurrection’ is all of a piece with the gospel’s emphasis on the somatic nature of ‘eternal life’. As we have seen, this cannot but have implications for the attitude of believers to the physical world in which they live as disciples of Jesus.

11. §3 Already there is a stench (Jn 11.39) The reference to the stench of a corpse after four days (Jn 11.39) certainly enhances the effect of the story. For Earth-conscious readers it shows a community facing up to the realities of death and decay. The NRSV translation, ‘And Jesus began to weep,’ has lost something of the dramatic tautness of the Evangelist’s two-word sentence, ‘Jesus wept’ (11.35 RSV), but it still leaves the audience in no doubt about Jesus’ grief at the death of his friend and the bereavement of the two sisters. Jesus’ offer of ‘eternal life’ to his friends is not about the avoidance of the lot of all living things on Earth. It is ‘the way’ of the creation that the outcome for humans, animals and plants is the same. ‘All are from the dust and all turn to dust again’ (Eccl. 3.19-20). The Fourth Evangelist does not appear to share the idea that this is a punishment or curse (Gen. 3.3, 19), that death was not part of the Creator’s original intention for the creation (Wis. 1.13; Rom. 5.12) or that death is ‘the wages of sin’ (6.23). It would seem, rather, that in the Johannine view, physical death with the decomposition that follows is simply what happens when people’s twelve hours of daylight are up. The natural aversion to this prospect – heard in the cries of distress all over the psalms (e.g. Ps. 6.4-5; 102.23-24) – is part of ‘the way’ of the creation that humans share with their more-than-human fellow inhabitants of the Earth. In fact, it reveals that God-given instinct for life without which no living thing could function in the world, that mysterious inbuilt design according to which life emerges, flourishes, reproduces itself and interacts with other life forms. As Leonardo Boff sees it, human beings can freely accept their mortality. They can surrender their life to Someone greater who can make of their yearning for endless life a reality. Death is not the negation of life or absence of relationship; it is the passage to another kind of relationship and of life. The human being is transformed through death. We do not really live to die; we die in order to live more fully and better – to be resurrected.3

Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is a ‘sign’ that even though believers must and will undergo physical death, the ‘eternal life’ that they were reborn into when they came to Jesus and that they are now living as his disciples will never be taken from them

2. M. Meyer (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts (New York: HarperOne, 2007), p. 177. 3. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. 84.

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(Jn 11.25-26). Thus death is overcome when people follow Jesus’ paradigm and make their living and dying into a gift for their friends (15.13). In this scene the paradigm is Jesus’ putting of his life on the line by returning to the place where he has only just escaped being stoned to death (11.8) in order to give life to his friend. This is an ‘indicator’ of the shepherd’s willingness to lay down his life for his sheep (10.11). As the narrative progresses, we discover that the raising of Lazarus is the catalyst for the decision of the authorities that Jesus must die. Thus Jesus’ journey to Judea is, in fact, his journey to the cross. The result of his life giving will be his own death.

11. §4 To gather into one the dispersed children of God (Jn 11.52) In another of those details where the narrative probably says more about the experience of the author’s community than about events in Jesus’ day, the Pharisees take the initiative in convening a council meeting to deal with the threat that Jesus represents. Of course, everything the Jerusalem leadership fears has already happened by the author’s time: belief in Jesus has proliferated and Rome has destroyed the temple (Jn 11.48). There is a double irony here. The chief priests and the Pharisees are scheming to obtain the very thing that will result in Jesus drawing all things to himself (12.32; Chapter 12, §5 ). We will focus on the high priest’s words, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (Jn 11.49-50). Of course, it is Caiaphas who knows nothing at all. First, the Evangelist is casting him in the role of David’s arch-enemy Achitophel who counselled the rebels at the time of Absalom’s coup that all they needed to do was to ‘seek the life of only one man, and all the people will be at peace’ (2 Sam. 17.3). This echo of David’s story will be reinforced by the Evangelist’s note that Jesus went into hiding ‘in the region near the wilderness’ (Jn 11.54), just as David did at the time of Absalom’s rebellion (2 Sam. 15.23). The location of Ephraim is uncertain, but because of its presumed links with the tribe of Ephraim, it is usually identified with Aphairema, a district located on the border of that tribal territory with Judah (1 Macc. 11.34).4 Being forced to take refuge in an inhospitable desert area is suggestive of danger and menace. In the Fourth Gospel, though, even this threatening environment is full of promise because the God whom Jesus calls Father is known for bringing people from a wilderness into a garden (Isa. 51.3). For the Evangelist, Caiaphas’ callous calculation that Jesus’ death would benefit the nation (Jn 11.51) is an unwitting prophecy. As C. H. Dodd noted, the idea that the high priest had the gift of prophecy shows awareness of ‘a popular pre-70 mystique of the Jerusalem priesthood and temple’.5 The Evangelist adds, ‘Not for the nation only,

4. Freyne, The Jesus Movement, p. 217. 5. Dodd, More New Testament Studies, p. 68.

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but to gather into one the dispersed children of God’ (11.52). We will explore what ‘into one’ might imply when discussing Jesus’ prayer, ‘that they may be one’ (17.11; Chapter 14, §7). Here we focus on ‘the dispersed children of God’. The underlying metaphor is the winnowing of crops in the wind (Jer. 18.17; 49.36). In the Scriptures, the dispersal (Gk, diaspora: scattering, dispersion) becomes a standard term for the Babylonian exile, understood as God’s punishment of an unfaithful people. It is a tantalizing thought that the Evangelist’s version of the Septuagint may have included the gloss to Dan. 12.2 in which those who sleep in the dust of the earth awake either to eternal life or to diaspora and everlasting contempt. The little commentary on Caiphas’ prophecy (Jn 11.51-52) evokes the exilic hope that scattered Israel will be gathered in (Jer. 31.10). However, there is a particular connection with Ezekiel who typically uses the ‘winnowing’ metaphor for the divine punishment both of Israel (Ezek. 12.15; 20.23; 22.15; 36.19) and of other nations (29.12; 30.23, 26) and speaks of the return as its reversal when grain will be planted instead of being blown away. Ezekiel employs the dispersal metaphor far more frequently than other prophets. The Septuagintal translation of Ezekiel uses the three verbs, diaspeirō: disperse, likmaō: crush or scatter and diaskorpizō: scatter. The latter is used in Jn 11.52. What is striking though is Ezekiel’s consciousness of the dispersal’s effect on the land of Israel. Unpeopled, uncared for and uncultivated, the land reverts to wilderness, a desolation. Conversely, when he speaks of the restoration, the prophecy addresses the land – ‘the mountains, the hills, the watercourses and the valleys, the desolate wastes and the deserted towns’ (Ezek. 36.4) – reassuring the land that its people will soon come home to their own soil to till it and make it fruitful again (Ezek. 36.1-15). To the exiles God says, through Ezekiel: I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. … I will summon the grain and make it abundant. … I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant. … The land that was desolate shall be tilled. … And they will say, ‘This land … has become like the garden of Eden.’ (Ezek. 36.24-36)

It is clear from the gospel – not to mention the broader tradition reflected in the Book of Revelation – that the Johannine construal of Jesus has been formed, to a significant degree, by reflection on Ezekiel. In our Earth-conscious reading, therefore, we too can follow Ezekiel’s lead and think about Jesus’ gathering into one of all the scattered children of God as something that has an impact on the more-than-human world. As we have frequently noted, in both Hebrew and Greek the same word (Heb., eretz and Gk, gē) can mean the earth beneath people’s feet, the land (of Israel), or Earth, our planet, as we would say today. We can see how this flexibility worked to interpreters’ advantage in the Matthean Jesus’ beatitude about the meek inheriting the earth (Mt. 5.5). This saying comes from Ps. 37.11 where it promises displaced or dispossessed people restoration to their inherited tribal lands in Israel. In another allusion to this psalm in Jubilees, Abraham blesses Jacob, ‘May you inherit all of the earth’ (Jub. 22.14; see also Jub. 32.19). There is a strong biblical and pseudepigraphical precedence, therefore,

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for seeing what the Scriptures say about the flourishing of the land of Israel as a vision for the whole Earth.

11. §5 Lazarus was one of those at table with Jesus (Jn 12.2) We return now to Bethany where Jesus is visiting his friends. The Evangelist makes a point of saying that at table with him was Lazarus ‘whom he had raised from the dead’ (Jn 12.2). Imprisoned in the dark cave of his tomb with a stone rolled over its opening, his hands and feet bound in burial cloths, Lazarus has heard Jesus’ voice summoning him and he has come out. A frequent biblical metaphor for death is being caught in a snare (e.g. Prov. 13.14; Ps. 116.3). Being released into freedom when one had been trapped or hemmed in is a classic Hebrew metaphor for the experience of God’s bountiful dealings with humanity (Ps. 4.1). So what Jesus has done for Lazarus is what God does, the God who brings prisoners out of darkness and gloom, and breaks their bonds asunder (Ps. 107.14). Lazarus, whose name is the Greek form of Eleazar, meaning ‘God has helped’, receives the freedom to walk away from death once Jesus tells the bystanders to loosen his bonds (Jn 11.44; Ps. 116.16). In referring to him as ‘our friend’ (Jn 11.11), Jesus identifies Lazarus as a disciple (15.14). In fact, ‘our friend’ would suggest that Mary, Martha and Lazarus have regularly offered hospitality to Jesus and his group, as does the mention of Judas’ presence in this scene (12.4). Evidently ‘the friends’ was a designation for  community members in the Johannine strand of the early Jesus movement (3 Jn 15). Lazarus is the model disciple of Jesus. Even though he never says a word in the gospel, what happens to him causes others to believe, and even to testify to what Jesus has done in a public demonstration (12.17-18). And then, as a direct result, Lazarus’ own life is threatened (12.10-11). Lazarus is thus the prototype for Jesus followers. ‘If they persecuted me, they will persecute you’ (15.20).

11. §6 Six days before the Passover (Jn 12.1) At the beginning of the account of the raising of Lazarus, the Evangelist has explained that his sister Mary was the one who anointed Jesus with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair (Jn 11.2). At this moment in the narrative, the anointing has not yet happened, so this seems to be a reminder of a story that the audience already knows well. In fact, this scene, where Jesus is so open to such a sensitive, intuitive and tactile expression of a woman’s devotion seems to have been a precious part of the collective memory of the early believers, because each of the four gospels includes a different form of it. It is helpful to compare the Johannine account with the others so that its distinctiveness stands out. In the synoptic versions (Mk 14.3-9; Mt. 26.6-13; Lk. 7.36-50) an unknown woman anoints Jesus. Mark and Matthew say the anointing

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took place at Bethany, but only John actually identifies the woman as Mary of Bethany. In the other gospels, the woman comes into the house from the outside. Here Mary is, of course, in her own home. In the other gospels, the woman brings with her a small alabaster flask of a very expensive ointment. Our Evangelist says that Mary took a pound of costly perfume, implying that she used a generous amount of the household’s supply of precious ointment to anoint Jesus, but that she did not use it all. It is only in the Fourth Gospel that Judas disapproves of the waste. He wants to get his hands on at least as much as Mary used on Jesus – an amount worth three hundred days’ wages for a labourer – ostensibly to sell it and give the money to the destitute. But Jesus says, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial’ (Jn 12.7). Another important difference is the form that the anointing takes. Luke’s unidentified ‘woman of the city’ weeps on Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair before kissing and anointing them. Mark and Matthew’s unidentified woman breaks open her alabaster flask and pours the contents onto Jesus’ head: a royal anointing (1 Sam. 10.1). In the Fourth Gospel, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’ feet and then wipes them with her hair. This means, of course, that she is anointed herself. Her hair is permeated with the ointment and the fragrance fills the whole house (12.3). A distinctive feature of the Johannine story is that it takes place ‘six days before the Passover’ (Jn 12.1), not two days before as in Mark and Matthew. In the Fourth Gospel, the Friday when Jesus dies is the day before Passover. Counting back six days, we find that it would have been a Sunday, the first day of the week, when Jesus was sharing that supper with his friends in their home, with Lazarus present, recently raised from the dead, with Martha serving at table, with Mary anointing his feet, and the fragrance spreading right through the house. The audience consists of people who meet on every first day of every week in a hospitable house for a community meal where they believe the risen Jesus is present among them. This story must surely have reminded them of that. If, as we gather from the gospel, the washing of the diners’ feet before reclining at table was customary at the Jesusbelievers’ community meals (13.14), we can assume that they were following the usual ancient Near Eastern social conventions for preparing to dine that would also have included the use of fragrant oils (see Lk. 7.46). This may well have been invested with a symbolic significance (1 Jn 2.20, 27).

11. §7 A pound of costly perfume (Jn 12.3) The NRSV has Mary using ‘a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard’ to anoint Jesus’ feet. The word translated as ‘pure’ is pistikē, meaning genuine or true. Its similarity to the word pistos, believing (Jn 20.27), and to its cognate verb pisteuō, used throughout the gospel for believing in(to) Jesus, must surely have registered with the original audience. The word translated as perfume in the NRSV is muron, meaning a fragrant lotion usually made with an olive oil base (Exod. 30.25). The quantity would be either the Roman pound (about 326.4 g = 96 denarii) or the

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mina (about 340 g = 100 denarii). At the time of the writing of the gospel, weights of precious metals such as silver were used to refer to monetary units. The pound (litra) of ointment used by Mary on Jesus’ feet (Jn 12.3) and the hundred pounds of embalming ointments brought by Nicodemus (19.39) are not intended as precise measures but are expressed in this way because ointments and perfumes, being expensive, were usually reckoned in weight rather than capacity.6 The nard (Gk. nardos: spikenard, perfume of nard) is an aromatic oil extracted from the root of a small perennial herb of the same name (Nardostachys jatamansi). This plant grows only at high altitudes in the Himalayas.7 Its availability in Israel, therefore, depended on an elaborate network of producers, traders, seafarers and travelling merchants, all of which was, no doubt, reflected in the price. There is, however, a question mark over the nard in this scene. It is missing from two important textual witnesses to Jn 12.3, Codex Bezae and the Old Latin. Also in P66 nardou has been added as a superlinear correction. It is possible that nard found its way into the text of the Fourth Gospel when a scribe, following the common practice of harmonizing the different gospels, supplied, on the basis of Mk 14.3, what appeared to be a missing noun for the adjective pistikē to qualify. What might the text have meant before this ‘correction’? It has been cogently argued that in the Evangelist’s regional context the adjective pistikē functioned substantively as a ‘trade name’ for myrrh.8 Myrrh (smyrna) is a resin produced from a low, thorny shrub, balsamodendron. Pliny (Natural History 12.35) notes that the best type of myrrh comes from the juice exuded by the tree before it has been tapped. From early times it was held in high regard in the ancient Near East as a domestic perfume and as an aromatic deodorant, especially for use in embalming. Pliny also notes that myrrh can be adulterated with various substances (Natural History 12.35). This suggests that smyrna pistikē would refer to myrrh of the purest and highest quality.9

Myrrh (Cistis incanus, Cistus creticus) was far more commonly used than nard, as it was more readily available. The region of Gilead on the east side of the Jordan was famous for producing it (Gen. 37.25; Jer. 8.22). Myrrh could be collected by tapping the sap of the shrub and collecting the ‘tears’ of resin once they had congealed.10 Another method, still in use today, fits well with the harvesting of the high-quality

6. M. A. Powell, ‘Weights and Measures’, in ABD VI, pp. 897–908 (907). 7. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, p. 813. 8. This argument is presented in detail in P. F. Esler and R. A. Piper, Lazarus, Mary & Martha: A Social Scientific & Theological Reading of John (London: SCM, 2006), pp. 165–77. 9. Esler and Piper, Lazarus, Mary & Martha, p. 175. 10. V. H. Matthews, ‘Perfumes and Spices’, ABD V, pp. 226–8 (227). See also N. CalduchBenages, ‘Aromas, Fragrancias y Perfumes en El Sirácida’, in Treasures of Wisdom: Studies in Ben Sira and the Book of Wisdom. Festschrift M. Gilbert (ed. N. Calduch-Benages and J. Vermeylen; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999), pp. 15–30 (27–8).

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spontaneously exuded myrrh mentioned by Pliny. ‘The soft, dark brown or black, gummy exudation is collected by drawing a bunch of leathery thongs through the plant … to which the gum sticks, or by combing out goats’ beards (to which the gum adheres).’11 This ‘first myrrh’ went into luxury products such as ‘the finest oils’ (LXX, prōta mura: first ointments) mentioned in the Scriptures (Amos 6.6; Song 4.14) and perhaps the smyrna eklektē (choice myrrh; Sir 24.15 NRSV) that reminds Ben Sira of the fragrance that Wisdom disperses in the world. The stem and leaves of the shrub were also used to prepare perfume and incense. The point of the suggestion that Mary’s precious ointment contained highest quality myrrh is that it opens up the possibility that she did indeed keep what remained for the day of Jesus’ burial (Jn 12.7) and that the Bethany household’s supply of myrrh – that the two sisters would have used to embalm their brother’s body – went into the ‘mixture of myrrh and aloes’ that Nicodemus brought to embalm the body of Jesus (19.39-40).

11. §8 The house was filled with the fragrance (Jn 12.3) At one level, the information that the house was filled with the fragrance (Gk, osmē:  odour, whether pleasant or unpleasant) of the perfume (Jn 12.3) shows the high quality of Mary’s fragrant oil. There is also a dramatic contrast with the osmē of death in the first Bethany scene (11.39). Ironically, Mary’s expression of gratitude to Jesus for returning her brother to life is to anoint him for burial. The house filled with fragrance has even more layers of meaning. First, ‘the house’ is a frequent biblical designation for the temple and the aroma of precious spices was a feature of the temple and an important aspect of its ‘Edenlikeness’ (Chapter 1, §4). Mary is showing honour to the temple of Jesus’ body. There is also the idea that the temple incense was a manifestation of the divine presence. This is found in Josephus’ description of Solomon burning vast quantities of incense at the dedication of the newly built temple (Ant. 8.102). Ben Sira’s comparison of Wisdom disseminating herself in the world where she has pitched her tent like the aroma of the temple incense even lists the incense’s ingredients as mandated by Moses in Exod. 30.34-35. Like cassia and camel’s thorn I gave forth the aroma of spices, and like choice myrrh I spread a pleasant odour, like galbanum, onycha, and stacte, and like the fragrance of frankincense in the tabernacle. (Sir. 24.13-16)

There may also be a fleeting echo of the Song of Songs, where perfumes – nard and myrrh – are in the air as the beloved reclines (Song 1.12-13). ‘Lazarus was one of those reclining with him’ (Jn 12.2 literal translation). If so, this would be a subtle

11. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, p. 812.

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reminder that Jesus is the bridegroom (Chapter 3, §4). In Jewish apocalyptic thought contemporary with the writing of the gospel, aromatic fragrances (along with phenomenal wine production and a repetition of the manna miracle) are associated with the revealing of the Anointed One (2 Baruch 29.5-8). As Mary anoints Jesus with fragrant oil (Jn 12.3), she acknowledges him as the Christ (Gk, christos: an anointed one). She unbinds her hair to wipe his feet. A find at Masada confirms that women with long hair wore it in a single braid down their back.12 Mary’s loosened long hair could be understood both as a sign of intimacy and as a customary indication of mourning. As she wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair, she too becomes an anointed one who exudes and spreads the pistikē fragrance that symbolizes faith. Sensing what lies ahead of Jesus, Mary is not afraid to express her love and concern for him and her understanding of who he really is in a physical and material gesture that calls upon some of Earth’s most beautiful produce. Her anointing of Jesus meets with Judas’ objection. His preoccupation with the monetary value of the ointment masquerades as concern for the poor for whom, like the hireling (Jn 10.13), he cares nothing. As we have seen, the money box indicates that the Jesus group had money and were regular almsgivers. We are not told where this money comes from, but we can probably assume that well-wishers give them donations to support them, the surplus of which they would then redistribute to those in need (13.29; Chapter 8, §2).13

11. §9 Jesus found a young donkey (Jn 12.14) On ‘the next day’ (Jn 12.12), the Monday, Jesus is heading for Jerusalem. It is the week before Passover, when the city was gradually becoming crowded to about ten times its normal population. As with the previous scene, this is another that occurs in all four gospels, so again, it is helpful to identify the distinctive features of the Johannine version. Characteristically, the Fourth Gospel goes its own way ‘in every point where it is possible to differ in relating the same event’.14 In the synoptics, Jesus, already riding on a donkey, is greeted by people shouting out their ‘Hosannas’. They make a ‘carpet’ with branches and their garments for the donkey to walk on. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus is apparently approaching Jerusalem from Bethany on foot. A crowd swarms out of the city to meet him. These are people who witnessed his raising of Lazarus and others who heard about it. They wave palm branches and shout out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord – the King of Israel’ (Jn 12.13; 1.49). Jesus’ response is to find a young donkey and sit on it for the rest of his journey into Jerusalem. His action is at once acceptance and critique of what the crowd is doing. He affirms their recognition of himself

12. Edwards, ‘Dress and Ornamentation’, p. 237. 13. Karris, Jesus and the Marginalized, pp. 27–8. 14. C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 370–1.

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as ‘the one who is to come’, yet he wants to inform their understanding of him by acting out a prophecy where Zion’s king comes to his royal city, not as a triumphant warrior in a ceremonial chariot or astride a war horse, but ‘humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey’ (Zech. 9.9-10). The donkey also recalls ‘the king’s mule’, a half-breed donkey that was the royal ceremonial mount in the days before horses were used for riding. A mule is a hybrid equid, the offspring of a male donkey and a mare. When the elderly David confirmed his successor on the throne, he arranged for the young Solomon to ride on his own mule down to the Gihon spring to be anointed as ‘King of Israel’ (1 Kgs 1.32-40; Chapter 9, §1). The Fourth Evangelist says that Jesus found the donkey, just as he found Philip (1.43), found the man he had healed at Bethzatha (5.14), and found the man born blind who had been thrown out (9.35). To be found by Jesus is to be invited to participate in his work. Donkeys were the domesticated descendants of the wild ass. They were kept principally to be pack animals, but people rode them as well. Donkey figurines with containers on their backs dating back to the fourth millennium BCE have been found in excavations in Israel.15 The freedom of the wild ass, as celebrated in Job 39.5-8 – unconstrained by a harness, away from the tumult of the city and not hearing the shouts of the driver – gives us an idea of a domesticated donkey’s existence on the outskirts of Jerusalem. This Johannine scene is particularly interesting for Earth-conscious readers. It is the only appearance of an animal as an individual actor in the narrative and it is the role that the animal plays that makes the point of the scene by challenging the crowd’s perception of Jesus. This young donkey is every bit as vocal as Balaam’s donkey (Num. 22.21-35), even if, like Lazarus, he says nothing! He belongs to a long line of animals mentioned in the Scriptures that show themselves wiser than humans. ‘Ask the animals’, says Job, ‘and they will teach you’ (Job 12.7). ‘Even the stork in the heavens knows its times and the turtledove, swallow, and crane observe the time of their coming,’ says Jeremiah, when confronting the people with their obtuseness (Jer. 8.7). Interestingly, in Jubilees the animals can speak before the expulsion from Paradise and they too – ‘all of the flesh which was in the Garden of Eden’ – are expelled (Jub. 3.28).

11. §10 They took branches of palm trees (Jn 12.13) Only in the Fourth Gospel is it specified that the branches were from palm trees (Jn 12.13). The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) is one of the oldest cultivated fruit trees in the ancient Near East and has supported human life in a harsh environment for at least five millennia. It is a dioecious tree (with male and female flowers on separate plants). Date palms can survive intense heat with little rain and very low humidity. However palm groves flourish best in oases and wadis where there is water underground or near the surface, as, for example, at Elim where there were seventy

15. Firmage, ‘Zoology (Animal Profiles)’, p. 1115.

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palm trees and twelve springs of water (Exod. 15.27; Num 33.9), and Jericho, known as ‘the city of palms’ (Judg. 1.16; 2 Chron. 28.15). Along with the cedar of Lebanon, the palm tree is a symbol of flourishing and fruitful life even in old age (Ps. 92.1215) because it does not produce fruit until it is about thirty-five years old and then averages over fifty kilos of fruit annually for at least another hundred years. In the Song of Songs the stateliness of this imposing, slender tree, that can grow to a height of 25 metres, with its ‘breasts’ – the clusters of date fruit – is a symbol of female beauty (Song 7.8). It is unlikely that the branches cut to acclaim Jesus were wasted as they would have had considerable ‘recycling’ potential. The palm tree’s strong, featherlike fronds could be woven into mats, baskets, utensils, sails and roof thatch.16 The palm is one of the trees whose branches were used to make booths for the festival of Tabernacles (Lev. 23.40). The palm frond was among the decorative motifs that gave the temple its Eden-like character (1 Kgs 6.32). By the first century CE it also had taken on nationalistic associations. It recalled the carrying of palm branches in procession to the temple in celebrations of victory in the Maccabean struggle for Jewish identity and independence in the face of aggressive Hellenization (1 Macc. 13.51; 2 Macc. 10.7; Chapter 10, §7 ).17 Coins minted by the insurgents during the revolts against Rome in 66–70 and 135 CE bear an image of a palm frond and the inscription: ‘For the liberation of Zion’.18 The waving of the branches, a distinctive feature of the Johannine account, seems more evocative of the Feast of Tabernacles (Chapter 9, §1) than of Passover. However, if we look at Zechariah, we find that the day to come when ‘a fountain shall be opened for the house of David’ (Zech. 13.1), when ‘living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem’ (14.8), when ‘the Lord will become king over all the earth’ (14.9), when ‘there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts’ (14.21; see Jn 2.14-16) and when the people ‘look on the one whom they have pierced’ (Zech. 12.10; see Jn 19.34) is actually a great festival of Tabernacles (Zech. 14.16). As, it would seem, is the heavenly celebration attended by that ‘great multitude that no one could count ... robed in white, with palm branches in their hands’ (Rev. 7.9). So this scene that appears on the surface to be an enthusiastic welcome for the Messiah into his royal city – and even perhaps a bit of subversive mimicry of a Roman victory procession – is really about ‘the hour’ (Jn 4.23) when springtime sowing and autumn reaping are simultaneous (4.36; Chapter 6, §7).

11. §11 The world has gone after him (Jn 12.19) The Fourth Gospel is distinctive in its insistence that the crowd’s enthusiasm is a direct result of the raising of Lazarus. The religious leaders have already decided

16. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, p. 807. 17. H. St J. Hart, ‘The Palm Branches in John 12.13’, JTS 3 (1952), pp. 62–3. 18. H. Lapin, ‘Palm Fronds and Citrons: Notes on Two Letters from Bar Kosiba’s Administration’, HUCA 64 (1993), pp. 111–35.

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that both Jesus and Lazarus must be put to death (Jn 11.50; 12.10-11). And now, before they have had an opportunity to implement their plan, here are all these eyewitnesses who saw Lazarus coming out of his tomb, testifying to that and putting on this public display of messianic mania (12.17). And their testimony is spreading: not just among the Jerusalem locals, but among all the people from the entire land of Israel who are gathering in Jerusalem for the festival, and all the pilgrims from the far corners of the Diaspora – ethnic Jews and God-fearing Gentiles from places like Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Greece and Italy. As the Pharisees are forced to admit in helpless exasperation, ‘Look, the whole world has gone after him’ (12.19). The impact of the dramatic irony depends on the various shades of meaning attached to ‘the world’ in the gospel, to be discussed later (Chapter 14, §3). We note at this stage of our Earth-conscious reading, however, that this unit of the narrative records the action and agency of an animal and a tree, so even the morethan-human world is caught up in what is happening.

11. §12 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) Jesus’ sense of urgency, wanting to complete his work while daylight lasted, might challenge us to be more proactive in the face of the reality that time is running out for the planet. Like Lazarus, we are asleep, bound hand and foot in a kind of paralysis, or at least a numbing of our consciences. Jesus calls us to wake up, stand up, live and act. Thus the publication of Laudato Si’ in 2015 has been welcomed as walking orders for followers of Jesus. Jesus and his disciples had a fund from which, it would seem, a regular amount was allocated for giving to the poor. It is widely recognized that the gravest impacts of environmental destruction are experienced by the poorest people on the planet. In Pope Francis’ analysis, the inadequacy of much of our ‘green rhetoric’ is due to the fact that it emanates from privileged contexts far removed from their plight and often lacks a social dimension. ‘A true ecological approach … must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.’19 ‘We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.’20 The palm fronds bring up the issue of trees. Earth is supposed to have many more trees than it now has. A certain amount of deforestation is part of the inevitable ecological impact of the development of agriculture, the price that has always been paid for human food security. ‘Even during the early millennia of farming in the Middle East, deforestation was becoming a problem.’21 At its worst,

19. Laudato Si’, par. 49. 20. Ibid., 139. 21. J. Feehan, Farming in Ireland: History, Heritage and Environment (Dublin: University College Dublin Faculty of Agriculture, 2003), p. 5.

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this deficit in the Earth system causes desertification, the utter reversal of the divine impulse to turn the wilderness into a garden, but other possible effects include the contamination of the atmosphere and the loss of the trees’ deep root systems that previously enabled the land to absorb water. As we saw when exploring the symbol of the Garden of Eden, a sustainable clearing in a forest is our natural habitat (Chapter 1, §4). It is … quite literally and scientifically, true to say that we were made to live in a landscape of open space with abundant trees; we are genetically programmed for that. We cannot do without it any more than we can do with air that has lost half of its oxygen and hope to be whole human beings.22

It is deeply moving to see aerial photographs of the Ethiopian church forests, groves of trees ranging in size from five to one thousand acres, in poignant contrast to the barrenness of the surrounding terrain. For centuries, Ethiopian believers in Jesus have been the guardians of these oases of biodiversity, alive with birdsong, a source of shade, medicine and timber to make sacred objects. Today’s disciples of Jesus are confronted with the worldwide deforestation of Earth and the loss of numerous tree species worldwide. Are they not pledged to tree planting and the worldwide guardianship of trees? The aroma of Mary’s pistikē filling the house (Jn 12.3) recalls the way that the beauty of Earth can come to us through our olfactory organs. Our sense of smell is something we share with other animals that use odour recognition to find their own territory, identify their young or their kin, receive warning of predators, find food and avoid poison. In our human experience, ‘Smell is stimulating. It stirs things up and makes us nostalgic – a wonderful word which literally means “ache for home” – which serves to inspire new circuits in the brain.’23 As we have seen, the capacity of smells to trigger forgotten memories underlies the association of the fragrances of the incense burned in the temple with the aromatic trees of Eden (Chapter 1, §4). In our world today Earth’s gift of aromaticity is frequently overwhelmed by the stench of atmospheric contamination that is the ‘collateral damage’ resulting from our irresponsibility. We are pledged to work so that Earth’s defiled air can again speak to us of Wisdom made flesh in Jesus. Because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty … a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of [God’s] goodness. (Wis. 7.24-26)

22. Feehan, ‘The garden God walked in’, p. 63. 23. Watson, Jacobson’s Organ, p. 16.

Chapter 12 T HE H OUR H AS C OME (JN 12.23)

12. §1 Some Greeks ask to see Jesus (Jn 12.20-21) During the days before Passover, a group of Greeks express an interest in seeing Jesus. They have ‘gone up’ (Gk, anabainō, go up on pilgrimage; Chapter 5, §1) to worship. A good number of foreigners would attend the great festivals. They were allowed access to the temple’s Court of the Gentiles. These God-fearers were attracted to Jewish religion and ethics and wanted to worship the God of Israel, without necessarily converting fully to Judaism. In their coming and asking to see Jesus, we can sense the magnetic field of his power to draw people to himself extending to a wider and wider circle (Jn 12.32). It began with the Judeans; then people from the whole of the land of Israel, then Jews living in the Diaspora. Now it has drawn foreigners represented by these very polite Greeks who approach Philip, perhaps because his name, meaning a friend of horses, suggests a Greek background, and ask, with great deference, to see – a Johannine term loaded with significance – Jesus. Philip is not sure what to do – a reflection, no doubt, of a debate in the Evangelist’s community. Up until now the group of believers has consisted only of Israelites. To some people’s surprise, Jesus has insisted on including Jacob’s estranged descendants, the Samaritans, people despised as hardly Israelites at all. But what about foreigners? Philip decides to consult Andrew and the two of them go to Jesus. Strangely though, the Greeks more or less evaporate as Jesus launches into another of his Johannine soliloquies. The Hellēnes represent the ‘dispersed children of God’ (11.52), the ‘other sheep’ that do not belong to Israel’s ‘flock’ (10.16). Jesus recognizes their approach as the signal he had been waiting for, so when he replies (Gk, apokrinomai, answer) to Philip and Andrew that the hour has come for the Human One (NRSV Son of Man) to be glorified, this and the ensuing discourse provide an answer to the Greeks’ request. Once foreigners have reached the initial stage of faith – asking to see Jesus – it means that the light has shone in every corner of the world. The day’s work of Jesus’ ministry is accomplished and he can welcome the night, the onset of his hour.

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12. §2 A grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die (Jn 12.24) Jesus then begins to explain what being glorified will entail. ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (Jn 12.24). Wheat is one of the eight species listed in Deuteronomy’s description of the ‘good land’ where Israel will eat bread without scarcity (Deut. 8.7-10). This annual grass grows to a height of 4 feet. The lower leaves are hairy, usually with 2 ears. The numerous varieties are divided into (a) spring and winter wheat; (b) hard and soft wheat; (c) red and white wheat; and (d) bearded and nonbearded varieties. In biblical times the parched grain was consumed or used as a meal offering; flour for bread as well as starch were prepared from it. The stems were used as fodder, animal bedding, compost, mulch, and fertilizer. They were also woven into hats, baskets, chair seats, and bee hives. The starch was used medicinally as an emollient.1

Jesus’ ‘parable’ takes for granted ancient beliefs that seeds actually die when sown because they lose their form (1 Cor. 15.36). He speaks here in continuity with Israel’s wisdom tradition of observing, respecting and marvelling at ‘the way’ of the more-than-human world: ‘The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on the rock’ to cite the wisdom attributed to Israel’s pre-eminent royal zoologist and botanist, Solomon (Prov. 30.19; 1 Kgs 4.33; Wis. 7.17-20. Chapter 4, §5). ‘The way’ of wheat is that it cannot multiply unless it ‘dies’. In this tradition it is accepted that mortality is inherent in God’s created order and that humans share the lot of all living things: they are given ‘a fixed number of days’ before they return to the earth out of which they were created (Sir. 17.1-2; Ps. 104.29). As we noted when attempting to discern the Johannine view of death (Chapter 11, §3), the Fourth Evangelist is attuned to this wisdom perspective, rather than to the idea that death is a punishment or a curse. It is ‘the way’ of the whole creation, therefore, that there can be no new life without death. James P. Mackey reflects on this fact of all life on Earth. Every transformation in the universal process of evolutionary creativity involves a death of existing forms or a de-formation. And since it is form that makes each thing and species of thing to be and to be what it is, the de-forming becomes the negative, nihilating force whereby one form of reality or thing is turned into another and thus itself made to cease to be what it was. This negative, nihilating, no-thinging force is then the inevitable negative pole of the positive force of creative evolution that forever brings new or renewed forms of being.2

1. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, pp. 809–10. 2. J. P. Mackey, Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future among Religions (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 35.

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While Mackey is referring to evolution, one can, as Wendell Berry remarked, see this process at work everywhere: in a forest, for example, where ‘whatever dies enters directly into the life of the living’.3 In a similar vein, Norman Wirzba notes, We have also to face the fact that every garden by necessity presupposes a massive amount of plant and animal death. Though our culture encourages the denial of death, gardens are constant reminders of the fact that whatever lives, lives only for a short while, and that for anything to live at all, others must die (most often by being eaten).4

12. §3 Where I am, there will my servant be also (Jn 12.26) A saying with strong parallels in the synoptics (Jn 12.25; cf. Mk 8.35; Mt. 10.39; Lk. 17.33) explains the little ‘parable’ about the grain of wheat. Using a vivid Semitic idiom, Jesus contrasts people who try to hold on to their life and actually lose it in the process, with people who are willing to give their life away and essentially keep it. They are prepared to make of their life a gift for others, to put their life on the line, following Jesus’ paradigm (Jn 10.11, 17-18; Chapter 10, §6), because they ‘believe into’ Jesus with performative faith (Chapter 8, §7). Consequently they have ‘eternal life’ and that is the life that they hold onto in this world (12.25; 3.36; Chapter 5, §8). From an Earth-conscious perspective we might note that ‘others’ need not necessarily be human and may well be other earthkind. The paradigm theme is taken up in another saying, ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also’ (Jn 12.26). For an audience who knew the Scriptures, this saying would have evoked the episode in David’s career that Caiaphas’ words about the expediency of Jesus death recalled (11.50; 2 Sam. 17.3; Chapter 11, §4). When escaping from Jerusalem, at the time of Absalom’s coup, to take refuge in the desert, David noticed that Ittai the Gittite was among his small band of loyal followers. David urged him to return to Jerusalem and not to feel bound as a foreigner to take David’s part in the conflict with Absalom. ‘But Ittai answered the king, “As the Lord lives, and as my lord the king lives, wherever my lord the king may be, whether for death or for life, there also your servant will be”’ (2 Sam. 15.21). As the events of the hour begin to unfold, this is the second hint that the young David, keeping his father’s sheep and risking his life to protect them (1 Sam. 17.34-35), is deep in the memory of the person telling this story. The shepherd is laying down his life for the sheep that the Father has entrusted to him. The undersong of David’s story keeps the audience alert to the significance of what is happening. ‘I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David’ (Ezek. 34.23).

3. W. E. Berry, Re-Collected Essays, 1956-1980 (San Francisco: NorthPoint, 1981), p. 240. 4. Wirzba, Food and Faith, pp. 52–3.

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The narrative continues with an episode where Jesus briefly experiences distress but refuses to ask the Father to save him from ‘the hour’. A sound comes from the skies and the crowd takes it to be thunder. Again we encounter the word ouranos playing its double role: as the sky and as heaven (Chapter 4, §3). The crowd’s impression that an angel has spoken to Jesus is in line with ancient beliefs in the theophanic quality of thunder that have found their way, for example, into Psalm 29 – one of the most ‘international’ of the psalms – a celebration of a thunder as the divine voice. God spoke to Moses in thunder (Exod. 19.19). For the author of Job, thunder is ‘the majestic voice of God’, even more impressive when accompanied by lightning (Job 37.1-5).

12. §4 Jesus ‘lifted up from the earth’ (Jn 12.32) We will focus now on the saying of Jesus with which this episode peaks: ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself ’ (Jn 12.32). This is the NRSV alternative reading, rather than ‘I will draw all people (Gk, pantas: indefinite accusative masculine plural of pas: all) to myself.’ The reading ‘all things’ (Gk, panta: accusative neuter plural of pan) is found in P66 and several other ancient authorities. It is also supported by two related passages in the gospel. ‘The Father loves the Son and has placed all things (panta) in his hands’ (3.35). ‘Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things (panta) into his hands …’ (13.3). The panta reading is of particular interest from our Earth-conscious perspective, because it suggests that Jesus lifted up on the cross draws not only humans but the more-than-human world to himself (Chapter 16, §3). The Evangelist has already mentioned the ‘lifting up’ (Gk, hupsoō: lift up, raise, cause to become high) of Jesus twice. Jesus has told Nicodemus that ‘just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up’ (Jn 3.14). In the biblical story behind this (Num. 21.6-9), people poisoned by snake bite lived when they looked at the bronze serpent that Moses had set up – according to the LXX, he set it up on a ‘sign’ (Gk, sēmeion, the word used for Jesus’ ‘signs’ throughout the gospel). Similarly, believers who look at Jesus lifted up will have ‘eternal life’ (Jn 3.15; 19.37; Chapter 5, §7). Further into the narrative, during a contentious debate, Jesus has told his adversaries that when they lift him up, they will realize who he is: the bearer of the Name, egō eimi (8.28). The continuation of the speech indicates that being lifted up will be a vindication of his claim that God is with him and that he is doing God’s work. There is a hint here that lifting up should be taken figuratively to indicate exaltation to a high status. This is certainly the way ‘lifting up’ is used in an Isaian passage that the Evangelist will soon quote. In the Septuagint, God’s servant-son (Gk, pais: servant, child, son) – that mysterious figure who personifies Israel – is ‘lifted up’ and ‘glorified’ having undergone intense suffering (Isa. 52.13). David is remembered as ‘the faithful man that the Lord raised up’ (LXX 2 Sam 23.1). Each newly installed Davidic king lifts up his head after his ritual drink from the Gihon Spring (Ps. 110.7; Chapter 9, §1). So an audience

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familiar with the Scriptures would have no difficulty in understanding the lifting up of Jesus as both his crucifixion and his exaltation. Now, as the narrative pursues its spiral path, the verb hupsoō has made a third appearance in this scene where the Greeks ask to see Jesus. An authorial aside informs the audience that when Jesus spoke of being lifted up from the earth (Jn 12.32) he was indicating (Gk, sēmainō: signify, give a sēmeion, a sign) ‘the kind of death he was to die’ (12.33), evidently the Roman method of execution by crucifixion and not the Jewish method, stoning (8.59; 10.31). The phrase ‘from the earth’ adds more precision. As we have seen, the Greek word gē can mean either the ground, the soil, the land as distinct from the sky or the Earth as part of the created kosmos as distinct from heaven, God’s dwelling in the realm beyond the firmament (3.13). So this lifting up of Jesus from the ground on a cross will be a sēmeion of his ascent back to where he was before (6.62). It will verify his claim that he ‘came down from heaven’ (6.41, 51, 58). The sight of Jesus raised up between heaven and Earth eventually explains his cryptic saying about the angels ‘ascending and descending on the Son of Man’, with its allusion to Jacob’s ladder (1.51; Gen. 28.12; Chapter 4, §3). The effectiveness of the double entendre in ‘lifting up’ depends, of course, on the audience’s capacity to go along with the ancient Hebrew cosmology that underpins all those Johannine dualities: above/below, heavenly/earthly, spirit/ flesh, of this world/not of this world, descent/ascent (Chapter 5, §6). This presents quite a challenge for today’s Earth-conscious readers, but not an insurmountable one if we keep in mind the analogical character of this and of all religious language.

12. §5 I will draw all things to myself (Jn 12.32) As suggested above, the reading ‘I will draw all things (panta) to myself ’ includes the more-than-human in what is affected by the lifting up of Jesus. In our exploration of Israelite kingship, we saw how the right kind of rule is beneficial for the morethan-human world. In the days of a king, whose justice is ‘like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth’, there is ‘abundance of grain in the land, waving even on the tops of the mountains’ (Ps. 72.6, 16; Chapter 4, §4–§5). We also saw how the hope that this flourishing would extend ‘to the ends of the earth’ (Ps. 72.8; Sir. 44.21) flowed into the concept of the basileia of God as a broadening of the land of Israel to include the whole Earth (Chapter 5, §5). We noted that the word panta occurs in two references to the Father having put everything into Jesus’ hands (Jn 3.35; 13.3). We also saw, when looking at the Johannine portrayal of Jesus as shepherd-king, how the sheep are held in Jesus’ hand (10.28) – the equivalent of being held in ‘the Father’s hand’ (10.29) – and how this applies not only to the people (for whom the sheep are metaphors), but also to the whole creation, from the depths of the sea to the heights of the mountains (Ps. 95.4-5; Chapter 10, §7). In his final prayer for his disciples, Jesus will say that the Father has given him authority over all flesh (pasa sarx; 17.2). The NRSV revisers have changed the RSV ‘flesh’ to ‘people’. Reading from an Earth-conscious perspective,

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however, we might find this change unnecessarily anthropocentric, especially given the use of the neuter in the continuation of the verse – ‘to give eternal life to all (Gk, pan: everything) whom you have given him’. It is true that in the Scriptures ‘all flesh’ usually means ‘all people’. There are, though, quite a few passages where an interpretation inclusive of the more-than-human is unavoidable (Gen. 7.21, 8.17; Dan. 4.12; Sir. 13.16; 44.18). This would be sufficient biblical warrant for us to interpret ‘all flesh’ in Jn 17.2 in a similar way. However, there is an even more cogent argument in favour of such a reading. The idea that ‘all things’ (12.32), ‘all flesh’ (17.2) and ‘everything’ (17.2) are entrusted to the exalted Jesus and made subject to his authority (Jn 17.2) must surely recall the Creator’s mandate to humankind, to have dominion over every living thing that moves in the sea, the air and the Earth, as well as every plant and tree (Gen. 1.28-29). Of course, this risks making Jn 17.2 one of those grey, rather than green, passages that cause the Bible to be such ‘an inconvenient text’ for Earth-conscious readers.5 The same must be said of Psalm 8, for all its beauty as a poetic celebration of the creation. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. (Ps. 8.6-8 RSV, adapted)

The psalm’s phrase, ‘You have put all things under his feet’ – which may also be a factor in the Johannine idea that Jesus has authority over everything (Jn 17.2) – is cited in several New Testament writings (1 Cor. 15.27; Eph. 1.22; Heb. 2.6-8). It has also ‘contaminated’ the verbal form of several applications of Ps. 110.1 to Jesus where the enemies in the psalm, instead of being made into a footstool for the king’s feet are put ‘under his feet’ (1 Cor. 15.25; Mk 12.36; Mt. 22.44). In fact, Ps 110.1 is often cited in the same breath as Ps. 8.6.6 There is no getting away from the fact that what eco-hermeneutical readers tend to call ‘the mandate to dominate’ has informed the earliest believers’ understanding of Jesus. How does all of this contribute, if at all, to a reading of the Fourth Gospel from an ecological perspective? It does if we get the point that all these comparisons between Jesus and Adam are trying to make: that Jesus is the new Adam, that his resurrection signals the renewal of the creation, that this is a fresh start for the Earth. It is also helpful to remember that the Fourth Gospel is not just the story of Jesus, but the story of how God’s commitment to the re-creation of the world will continue through the mission of his disciples, when they are sent as he was sent (20.21-23; Chapter 4, §1). So to think of panta being given into Jesus’ hands is to think of ‘all things’ being entrusted to his disciples as well. Their mission is to do the creating and sustaining ‘works of God’ (6.28), as modelled by the Good Shepherd,

5. Habel, An Inconvenient Text, pp. 2–3, 8–9. 6. Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 53–4.

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even to the point of putting their life on the line as he did (10.11). So Jesus does actually give eternal life – the life of the aeon (Chapter 5, §8) – to ‘all things’ (17.2). His inauguration of the aeon restores the world to what the Creator intended for it and now, in his disciples, humankind can again be seen, working at their original task: to care for the garden of the Earth. Thus Jesus, lifted up in crucifixion and in exaltation, draws all created things within the ambit of God’s healing and life-giving love for the kosmos (Jn 12.32; 3.16). The verb ‘draw’ (Gk, helkō: drag, pull) conveys the sense of a strenuous pulling action. It is used of dragging an exceptionally heavy fishing catch to shore (21.8), for example. Jesus drawing all things to himself may even be a clue to the significance of the 153 fish – the number of known fish species at the time, as some suggest. To understand how the crucified Jesus draws all things to himself, it may be helpful to think about the major symbols that Jesus has used to explain himself – water, food, light – and their power to attract everything that lives. People in the dark are instinctively drawn towards light; plants grow towards light. All living creatures are drawn instinctively to a water source, just as plants send down roots into the soil’s moisture. And of course, it is the innate tendency of ‘all flesh’ to be drawn to a food source (6.26; 55). We will find, when we come to Jesus’ crucifixion, that the hour when he is lifted up is the moment when he draws to himself everyone who thirsts. It is as if he says at that moment, ‘Come to the waters … that you may live’ (7.37-39; Isa. 55.1-2). And these waters are none other than the rivers that Ezekiel saw streaming out of the temple (Ezek. 47.1). That ‘magnetism’ of the temple drawing people from all over the known world towards the place of encounter with the God of Israel (Chapter 1, §6) is also, no doubt, in the Evangelist’s mind.

12. §6 Isaiah saw his glory (Jn 12.41) We come now to the Evangelist’s appraisal of the whole ‘day’ that the light has been shining in the world. Jesus has now gone away and hidden himself, having worked until evening fell (Ps. 104.23). His sēmeia have met with disbelief, except on the part of a few, and even some of these are afraid to profess faith in him openly. The Evangelist cites two passages from Isaiah. The first one is what Isaiah said about the servant who was lifted up – ‘Lord, who has believed what we have heard?’ (Isa. 53.1; NRSV ‘our message’; also cited in Rom. 10.16). The second is a Johannine adaptation of what the divine voice says in Isaiah’s account of his call to be a prophet. He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, so that they might not look with their eyes, and understand with their heart and turn – and I would heal them. (Jn 12.40, citing Isa. 6.10)

In several different strands of the early Jesus movement an appeal was made to Isaiah’s experience of rejection in order to explain why Jesus met with so little

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faith in Israel (Mt. 13.14; Mk 4.12; Lk. 8.10; Acts 28.26-27; Rom. 11.8). In Isaiah 6, God warns the newly commissioned prophet that his message is so unlikely to be received that he might as well say something sarcastic: ‘Don’t listen, whatever you do, or God might heal you!’ This assures Isaiah that even people’s refusal to hear, see and understand will become part of God’s saving design. In the Johannine version of Isa. 6.10, adapted from the Septuagint, the divine agency in bringing about this negative reaction is emphasized and the past tense is introduced to make the quotation more effective as a summing up of Jesus’ work of doing so many signs ‘about himself ’ for people who would not believe (Jn 12.37). The Fourth Evangelist claims that Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke about him (Jn 12.41). What Isaiah saw, according to the Septuagint, was God seated on a high (LXX, hypsēlos: lifted up) throne and the house (ho oikos) full of the divine glory (Isa. 6.1). The house – that cannot but remind the gospel’s audience of the house full of the fragrance of Mary’s pistikē (Jn 12.3; Chapter 11, §8) – is the temple designed to be a representation of the whole creation (Chapter 1, §5). As the heavenly beings in Isaiah’s vision acknowledge in their hymn, the whole Earth is full of God’s glory (Isa. 6.3). So Isaiah’s vision of the glory filling the temple pointed to that glory’s visibility in the world. The Fourth Evangelist would say that this glory – the visible, audible and tangible presence of God – was the glory that people saw manifested in Jesus’ signs (Jn 2.11). And that is why believers can claim, ‘we have seen his glory’ (1.14). Earth-conscious readers, though, can see Jesus’ glory as a sēmeion of the divine glory that fills the oikos of their Earth home, a sign of Wisdom who delights to dwell in her ‘inhabited world’ (LXX, oikumenē) and to bring it to completion (Prov. 8.31; Chapter 2, §1).

12. §7 Saviour of the World (Jn 3.17; 4.42; 12.47) In Jesus’ declaration that he has come to save the world (Jn 12.47) the gospel’s spiral path returns to a recurring motif, his role as saviour. On the strength of the woman of Sychar’s word and then because of the word of Jesus himself, the Samaritans come to the conviction that Jesus is truly ‘the Saviour of the world’ (4.39-42). This title for Jesus is unique to the Johannine writings, appearing only here and in the earliest ‘commentary’ on the Fourth Gospel (1 Jn. 4.14). The emphatic adverb in Jn 4.42 (Gk, alēthōs: truly) insists on the legitimacy of this title. Obviously, since ‘Saviour’ is a common epithet for the God of Israel, this has to do with Jesus being the revealer of God (Jn 1.18). The emphasis may also be intended to challenge the use of ‘saviour’ in the Hellenistic world as a title given to deities such as Zeus, Asclepius, Isis and Serapis, and even bestowed on emperors. According to Philo, Gaius Caligula (ruled 37-41 CE) was acclaimed as ‘the saviour and benefactor … who poured fresh streams of blessings on Asia and Europe’ (Embassy 4.1). Augustus Caesar is hailed as ‘Saviour’ in the Priene Calendar Inscription (9 BCE). The title ‘Saviour of the World’ was given to the Roman emperors from Hadrian (117–138 CE) onwards.

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The Johannine Jesus’ role as saviour is also expressed as a verb (Gk, sōzō: rescue, save, heal). This verb can have quite an everyday meaning. The sheep that go through the gate will be ‘safe’ for the night in the protection of the sheepfold (Jn  10.9). If Lazarus is able to sleep ‘he will be alright’ (11.12 NRSV). Typically though, the Evangelist leaves leeway for a deeper import to suggest itself. The sheep and, in particular, Lazarus – the sheep that recognizes his shepherd’s voice and comes out (10.3; 11.43-44) will indeed be saved. God’s purpose in the sending of the son is that the world might be saved through him (3.17). Jesus has come ‘not to judge the world but to save the world’ (12.47). He explains his ‘signs’ so that people might understand and be saved (5.34). Saving the world is, of course, ‘the work of God’ that Jesus has learnt as the apprentice-Son watching his Father at work, creating, sustaining and renewing the Earth (5.19-20; Chapter 7, §4). In the biblical tradition, God’s work is consistently called saving. In fact, for Greek Solomon, the whole history of Israel can be told as the story of how people down the centuries were ‘saved by Wisdom’ (Wis. 9.18). Jesus’ various signs show what a multifaceted concept salvation is – providing in festive abundance for people who lacked wine and food, healing the sick, relieving people of disabilities that imprisoned them in poverty and marginalization, raising the dead to life. Salvation is a healing of whatever inhibits or diminishes that gift of ‘life in all its fullness’ (Jn 10.10 NEB) that Jesus came into the world to bring. The Scripture that provides the Evangelist with an apt ‘last word’ on Jesus’ ministry homes in on the divine desire to restore the world – ‘I would heal them’ (Jn 12.40, citing Isa. 6.10) This healing is the will of the Father that, for Jesus, takes priority even over eating (Jn 4.31-34). And this healing is none other than the completion of God’s work of creation.

12. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) Jesus, being himself the grain of wheat that dies (Jn 12.24) models the prerequisite for any kind of new creation. Perhaps this Johannine principle, based on observation of ‘the way’ of Earth’s flora, could become the foundation for an ecological ethic drawn out of the Fourth Gospel. Disciples taking Jesus as their ‘way’ (14.6) will inevitably find themselves facing the prospect of some kind of ‘dying’. As the Johannine Jesus states it, ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also’ (12.26). The scriptural background to this saying challenges believers in Jesus to respond to their ‘king’ – whose royal title must always appear in inverted commas – as Ittai did ‘whether for death or for life’ (2 Sam. 15.21). Dying to our present destructive addictions or ‘living simply so that others may simply live’, as Mohandas Gandhi taught, would be ways of putting into practice the ecological implications of such a response. ‘The time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth.’7 The meagre public response in 7. Laudato Si’, par 193.

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industrialized nations to the alarming predictions from climate scientists is due only partially to extreme climate change denial. As sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard has shown with her ‘case study’ of a town in Norway, people’s knowledge about climate change is often abstract and disconnected from their political, social and domestic lives.8 There is certainly an underlying fear of losing our life(style), but unless we are prepared to make changes, our grandchildren will perish in the dying world that we are currently de-creating. The ‘grain of wheat’ saying exemplifies the capacity of religious writings not only to ‘provide meaning for human diminishment and death’ but also to ‘celebrate the gifts of nature that sustain life’.9 In particular, it calls Jesus’ followers to respect the mystery of seeds. John Feehan writes: The unfolding of possibility wrapped up in a seed becomes the template for the even greater mystery whereby all of life has unfolded not only from an acorn sown on this earth of ours, but from a mustard seed of nothingness that contained all possibility within itself, at the beginning of all things 14.7 billion years ago.10

Furthermore, as Feehan explains, this ‘ex-plication’ is ‘the very unfolding of Godself ’.11 Disciples of Jesus must bring their reverence for this mystery to the ongoing debate about genetic modification. The potential risk to which GM exposes Earth’s complex and delicately balanced ecosystems calls for ‘a broad, responsible, scientific and social debate … capable of considering all the available information and of calling things by their name’.12 The current corporate control of seeds and of their genetic diversity raises serious ethical questions. Many people share Ellen F. Davis’ view that terminator seeds are ‘an offensive biological weapon’, an affront to the Source and Fountain of life (Ps. 36.9).13 This is especially the case when life forms are patented, thereby removing them from the commons, for purely commercial reasons.14 Finitude is ‘the most readily observable and non-negotiable characteristic of our material world’.15 Jesus, the grain of wheat that died, calls his followers to accept their mortality peacefully as a sharing in the condition of all ‘on-Earth-things’

8. K. M. Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 9. Tucker, ‘Religion and Ecology: Survey of the Field’, p. 400. 10. Feehan, ‘The garden God walked in’, p. 65; Creation, Evolution and Faith: Reflections on the Presence of God in Creation (Dublin: John Feehan, 2015), p. 17. 11. Feehan, ‘The garden God walked in,’ p. 65. 12. Laudato Si’, par. 135. 13. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, pp. 52–3. See also Laudato Si’, par. 134. 14. S. McDonagh, Patenting Life? Stop!: Is Corporate Greed Forcing Us to Eat Genetically Engineered Food? (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 2004). 15. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, p. 37.

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(Jn 3.12). Instead, our pretensions to mastery, our exploitation and waste of Earth’s gifts all boil down to a refusal to accept finitude. If we can follow Jesus’ paradigm, we will welcome our own mortality along with that of the birds and flowers, of our dreams and our gods. We will welcome the transformation of our individual bodies into the mystery of our Sacred Body. And we will do this precisely because life rushed into this universe and became vibrantly mortal.16

Among the cluster of English words derived from the Latin salvator, translating the Greek Sōtēr is the word ‘salve’. As a noun it can mean a healing ointment or anything that heals. As a verb it means to apply a healing preparation to a wound. Another related verb, ‘salvage’ means rescuing anything in danger of damage or destruction. In a derivation with a curious history, a salver was a tray used by a spectacularly devoted courtier, the king’s taster, who would risk his own life to save the king’s by sampling the royal food to ensure that it was not poisonous. Disciples, sent as Jesus was ‘to save the world’ (Jn 12.47), might find in these salvation-related words some pointers as to what doing God’s work might involve in our world today. Ecologically concerned scientists and researchers, responsible farmers, Earth-conscious town planners and architects, to give just a few examples, are all contributing to a salving of Earth’s wounds. Recycling and upcycling, forms of salvage practised by ordinary people, are certainly helping to heal the planet. Protestors who insist that human interventions in the more-than-human world – such as fracking – are tested rigorously before they are used, lest they be ‘poisonous’ to the environment, are the bearers of Earth’s ‘salver’, especially those who risk arrest, imprisonment and even death. Saving the planet is the work that Jesus’ ‘own’ are sent to do.

16. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, p. 57.

Chapter 13 E AT, F RIENDS AND D RINK (SONG 5.1)

With this chapter we embark on the actual events of ‘the hour’. In narrative time, Jesus’ long testamentary speech precedes his death, but in this discourse the exalted One addresses his community of believers gathered for their weekly sharing of food and drink in which they anticipate the Bridegroom’s wedding banquet (Song 5.1; Rev. 19.9).

13. §1 Jesus began to wash the disciples’ feet (Jn 13.5) ‘The hour’ begins with Jesus’ evening meal with his disciples ‘before the festival of the Passover’ (Chapter 5, §2) when he will leave the world to go to the Father. This intimation of Jesus’ impending death combines Jewish belief in ‘the resurrection’ – a life for the righteous with God beyond death (Chapter 5, §5) – with a variation on the ascent/descent theme: Jesus has come out from God and is returning there (Jn 13.3). A final demonstration of his love for his own will bring his day’s work to completion. He will enact symbolically the events of the hour whereby he will fully accomplish what the Father has sent him to do. Jesus stands up from the table and lays aside his outer garment (Gk, himatia: any kind of clothing). The most common kind of clothing for men was the himation, a rectangular piece of cloth worn draped around the body and removed when working (Mk 13.16). Jesus wraps a towel (Gk, lention: a piece of cloth, most likely linen, used primarily for drying) around his waist. He pours water into the washbasin that would be part of a dining room’s accoutrements, and begins to wash the disciples’ feet. People wore sandals to walk through dusty streets littered with human and animal waste so, even if someone had bathed before attending a meal, it was impossible to avoid arriving with dirty feet. In the Jewish culture of the time, washing guests’ feet before inviting them to recline on dining couches was a customary act of hospitality (Gen. 18.4; 24.32; Lk. 7.44). Since this was normally done by a servant who would not be a diner at the meal (1 Sam. 25.41), foot washing was regarded as a menial task. ‘To wash the feet’ thus became an idiomatic expression for doing the kind of humble tasks that, for example, a deutero-Pauline author would see as the role of women in the Christian community (1 Tim. 5.10).

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In this scene Jesus himself highlights what is unusual: that someone rightly called teacher and Lord would do this for his disciples.

13. §2 You ought to wash one another’s feet (Jn 13.14) It is a little unusual that this is not a pre-supper foot washing. This alerts us to the scene’s symbolic import, especially since Jesus refers to what he has done as setting an example (Jn 13.15; Gk, hypodeigma: example, illustration, pattern). So why the washing of feet? According to biblical anthropology, people perceive and understand with their eyes and heart (Isa. 6.10, as cited in Jn 12.40), the heart being the location of the intelligence. People engage in communication with their mouth and ears. And they act with their hands and feet.1 In the Scriptures, the feet and hands (Ps. 18.33-36), or sometimes just the feet (Ps. 119.59, 101) are a frequent synecdoche for the capacity to do, perform, act. Conversely, what makes idols so ridiculous is their inability to move hand or foot (Ps. 115.7; Wis. 13.18-19). We might, therefore, connect Jesus’ desire to wash the disciples’ feet with the walking that they are about to undertake (Jn 8.12, 11.9-10, 12.35-36). The foot washing is an ‘example’, so they must walk as he walked (1 Jn 2.6). In fact, as Jesus’ apostles (Jn 13.16; Gk. apostolos: a person sent, a messenger), theirs will be the feet of those who announce peace and say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’ (Isa. 52.7). The most reliable guide to the meaning of the foot washing must surely be Jesus’ reply to Peter’s objection, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me’ (Jn 13.8). Jesus has already told Nicodemus ‘It is necessary (Gk, dei) that the Son of Man be lifted up’ (Jn 3.14 literal translation). The Evangelist has explained that the Spirit will not be given until Jesus is glorified (7.39). Jesus has warned that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it will not bear fruit (12.24). Later he will say, ‘If I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you’ (16.7). These sayings are all different takes on Jesus’ death. The footwashing scene is another and that is the real reason why Peter resists it. He wants to save Jesus from being put to death (13.37). But Jesus’ initiative in standing up from the supper proclaims loud and clear that no one takes his life from him. ‘I lay it down of my own accord,’ he says (10.18). His laying aside of the clothes that signify his status enacts this; the same verb is used in Jn 10.11 (Gk, tithēmi: place, lay down, put down; NRSV ‘took off ’; Chapter 10, §6). The towel symbolizes the lowly status of a servant. While the humiliation involved in crucifixion is not stressed in this gospel, the quotation in Jn 12.38 – probably an example of the Jewish practice of referring to a passage by quoting its incipit – implies that Jesus is indeed the ‘servant’ described in Isaiah 53. As he pours clean water over the disciples’ feet to cleanse them of all their uncleannesses (Ezek. 36.25-27), the Earth element of water, flowing ‘like a silver thread’2 through the gospel, rises again to the surface of text, hinting that

1. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, p. 223. 2. Lightfoot, St John’s Gospel, p. 121.

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Ezekiel’s promise will be even more vividly fulfilled at the climax of the hour when water gushes from Jesus’ pierced side (Jn 19.34). When Jesus resumes his garment (13.12), he shows that having laid down his life he will take it up again (10.18). Returning to the table signifies returning ‘to where he was before’ (6.62), especially if his leaving the table, in the first place, suggested the coming of the Word into the world from the heavenly realm where he reclined in the bosom of the Father (1.18; Chapter 2, §9). The disciples must let Jesus wash their feet. As Peter still has to learn (Jn 18.10-11; 21.18-19), they must respect his willingness to lay down his life and accept that as a template for their own lives. In fact, when Jesus says, ‘You also ought (Gk, opheilō: owe, be obliged) to wash one another’s feet’ (13.14), he uses a verb with strong connotations of moral obligation and even legal requirement (see 19.7). It is in this concept of Jesus’ story as both paradigm and imperative that the ethical vision of the Fourth Gospel is found. Jesus’ new commandment, ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (13.34) calls for concrete action modelled on the foot washing that is, in its own way, a sēmeion of Jesus’ hour.3 The author of the earliest commentary on the gospel understood this well. ‘We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another’ (1 Jn 3.16). For Earthconscious readers, the challenge will be to broaden our definition of ‘one another’ to include all Earthkind.

13. §3 Come! Have a meal! (Jn 21.12) As mentioned in our discussion of the redactional addition to the Bread of Life discourse, there is no narrative of eucharistic institution in the Johannine ‘Last Supper’ scene (Chapter 8, §9). The Fourth Evangelist is as consistently purposeful in not including material from the broader Jesus tradition as in presenting independent material. Take, for example, the omission of the baptism of Jesus by John, the avoidance of the ‘agony’ in the garden or the absence of mockery from the crucifixion scene. These and so many other divergences from the tradition behind the synoptics are intentional and have profound theological implications. They challenge us to take this eucharistic ‘omission’ seriously. Most Christian readers of the Western Catholic tradition are so conditioned by their liturgical experience that they cannot imagine the Eucharist without the repetition of words attributed to Jesus identifying bread and wine as his body and blood. So, for example, there are New Testament scholars who think that because these words are ‘missing’ there is ‘no explicit reference’ to the Eucharist in the Fourth Gospel.4 It has taken some decades for the implications of C. K. Barrett’s insight, that 1 Cor. 11.23-25 should be seen ‘more as a model for behaviour than

3. Labahn, ‘It’s only Love’, pp. 25–6. 4. R. T. Fortna and T. Thatcher, Jesus in Johannine Tradition (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), p. xv.

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as words to be recited’, to register.5 The liturgical scholarship of recent decades has shown, however, that the institution narrative did not become a feature of the Eucharist until the Constantinian era when it was inserted into the anaphora for catechetical purposes.6 The manuscript transmission of the third century CE Syrian Anaphora of Addai and Mari, particularly in a variant of it known as the Sharar (The Third Anaphora of Saint Peter), betrays the unease of four later scribes, each interpolating the institution narrative at a different point in the text.7 Interestingly, Addai and Mari has Johannine affinities, for example, an allusion to Jn 17.3 – ‘that all the inhabitants of the earth may know you, that you alone are the true God and Father, and you sent our Lord Jesus Christ, your beloved son.’8 What is probably our earliest extant eucharistic anaphora, The Alexandrian Liturgy of Saint Mark, preserved in the Strasbourg Papyrus (ca 200 CE), was until quite recently thought to be only partially preserved, because it contained no institution narrative. However, many scholars of eucharistic origins now regard it as a complete anaphora.9 It has long since been accepted that eucharistic practice ‘grew out of faith in the risen Christ more than out of obedience to his specific dictates’.10 It is now recognized that the synoptic and Pauline ‘institution narratives’ are aetiologies. Rather than reporting what Jesus actually did and commanded to be done by his followers, they tell us what Jesus’ followers thought they were doing when they assembled for a meal – the primary form of association practised by common interest groups in the first century CE. What they thought they were doing depended, of course, on their interpretation of Jesus and this varied from one strand of the movement to another. We will be able to discern what Johannine believers thought they were doing, to the extent that we have, to quote John Reumann, ‘loosened our hold on the [synoptic and Pauline] Upper Room as the origin for the Lord’s Supper in Christianity, at least as a single direct-line cause’.11 For example, there is the invitation of the risen Jesus to the astonished disciples, ‘Come! Eat!’ (Jn 21.12 literal translation; Gk, aristaō: eat a meal, without reference to any particular time of the day). The breakfast of grilled fish and bread prepared by Jesus and the

5. C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (2nd edn; London: A. & C. Black, 1971), p. 264. 6. Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins, p. 155. 7. A. Gelston, The Eucharistic Prayer of Addai and Mari (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 72. 8. R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), p. 43. 9. Jasper and Cuming, pp. 74–9. W. D. Ray, ‘The Strasbourg Papyrus’, in Essays on Early Eucharistic Prayers (ed. P. F. Bradshaw; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), pp. 39–56. 10. D. N. Power, The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992), p. 23. 11. J. Reumann, The Supper of the Lord: The New Testament, Ecumenical Dialogue, and Faith and Order on Eucharist (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), p. 49.

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meal in Galilee (Jn 6.1-14) are most certainly intended to evoke the meals that gave expression to the audience’s fellowship with Jesus and with one another (1 Jn 1.3, 7). Thus the Fourth Gospel can give us some insight into the weekly assembly of Johannine believers for the meal that would eventually be called the Eucharist, provided that we can ‘hold in abeyance two thousand years of eucharistic theology and a similar amount of Last Supper iconography’ that invariably depicts Jesus at table with twelve men.12

13. §4 The poor shall eat and have their fill (Ps. 22.26) An obvious place to start is the prevalence of ingesting language in the gospel.13 This language concerns mainly the drinking of water to satisfy thirst and the eating of bread and fish to assuage hunger. From our Earth-conscious perspective, the materiality of this drink and food that sustains physical life is a primary consideration that must precede any metaphorical interpretation. We twenty-firstcentury readers of the gospel are conditioned to think of the Eucharist as a ritual sharing of nominal or token amounts of ‘spiritual’ food and drink, understood to be something other than ‘ordinary’ food and drink. We tend, therefore, to bypass the material in our preoccupation with its symbolic significance. The earliest Eucharist, however, was an actual meal. Such a meal – as perhaps sketched in Jn 6.1-14 – where people were willing to share whatever food and drink they had so that everyone could experience being fed to satiety from Jesus’ hand, with plenty left over, must have been an extraordinary experience of the reversal of societal norms. After all, in the surrounding culture meals were a major expression of social stratification: in the arrangement of places – whether at table or in spaces adjacent to the relatively small dining area in a typical house – in the varying portion sizes and quality of the food, in the ratio of water to wine in the cups served to the diners, in the gender restrictions for reclining at a meal.14 On this last point: among the Greeks, men reclined for meals and women normally dined in a separate room, except, perhaps, on intimate family occasions. There are some Roman funerary representations of women sitting on a chair or at the end of their husbands’ couches. It seems that from around the turn of the era, Roman women began to recline, a new development that would have fitted with the ethos of early Christian meals.15 To what extent this happened at the Johannine Eucharist cannot be stated with any precision. However, the strong, insightful women characters in

12. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. 360. 13. J. S. Webster, Ingesting Jesus: Eating and Drinking in the Gospel of John (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). 14. D. E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 254–6. 15. C. Osiek and M. Y. Macdonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), pp. 159–62.

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the Fourth Gospel would appear to reflect a community where the participation and witness of women was valued, so presumably this was reflected in the dining arrangements. On the basis of the Johannine ‘last supper’ scene, we can assume that when the believers gathered for their meetings on ‘the first day of the week’ (Jn 20.19, 26; Chapter 16, §7), they prepared to recline at table (13.23, 25) by washing one other’s feet in imitation of Jesus, rather than leaving this task to a servant or slave. To see mutual foot washing as a distinctive feature of the Johannine Eucharist is a departure from conventional ‘sacramental’ readings of John 13 that make connections with baptism. For some scholars, it is even a somewhat ‘unlikely’ interpretation.16 Jesus dipping bread (Gk, psōmion: a broken-off piece of bread) in a condiment and handing it to Judas indicates that he undertook the role that Jewish meal rituals assigned to the father of a family or the leader of a fellowship (13.26). We can safely assume that the community continued to use these rituals. So at the beginning of the meal, the presider would have blessed the Creator who causes Earth to yield the food and drink that sustains human life, while breaking and sharing out a loaf of bread. The Last Discourse – originally ending with Jesus saying, ‘Rise, let us be on our way’ (14.31) – presupposes the conventions that voluntary associations or dining clubs in the Greco-Roman world followed at their meetings: the serving of the food (Gk, deipnon: supper) followed by conversation, particularly on the values that the meal expressed, during which drinks were served (Gk, symposion: a group of people drinking together). Among Hellenized Jews, interpretation of the Scriptures would typically be a topic for discussion at the symposion. The gospel itself, with its wealth of allusion to the Scriptures, must surely be the product of such conversations. The Evangelist mentions a regular feature of dining clubs, ‘the common purse’ (13.29). We have already looked at its function in the world of the narrative (Chapter 8, §2), but viewed from a sociorhetorical perspective this is certainly ‘reminiscent of Greco-Roman meals held by collegia or trade associations where there would be a treasurer’s report and charitable acts or future spending would be discussed’.17 The beloved disciple, a paradigmatic figure, who reclines next to Jesus at the meal – literally, ‘in his bosom’ (13.23) so that he can lean back ‘on his breast’ (13.25) models for Johannine believers that closeness to Jesus that is the way ‘the Word was with God’ in the beginning (1.1, 18; Chapter 2, §9). The portrayal of this representative figure must have assured them that their community meals made them as ‘as intimate with Jesus as Jesus is with the Father’.18 As the good shepherd says, ‘I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father’ (10.14-15).

16. J. C. Thomas, Footwashing in John 13 and the Johannine Community (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), p. 13. 17. B. Witherington III, John’s Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 233. 18. Brown, The Gospel According to John, II, p. 577.

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Each of these features adds another brush stroke to our picture of Johannine Jesus believers at table, apparently not looking to an ‘institution narrative’ as an articulation of the special significance of the meals they shared. The experience of sharing and enjoying the generous provision of sustaining food and drink must have spoken powerfully to them of the ‘true bread’ and the ‘spring of water’ that would sustain the ‘eternal life’ that they were already beginning to live through their faith in Jesus. As we have seen (Chapter 6, §4), at an early stage of the group’s existence their meals may well have consisted principally of bread and water, quite an acceptable meal in the ancient world. As they ate and drank, they shared their memories of Jesus and recalled how the Scriptures bore witness to him. Their sapiential view of him would have encouraged them to see themselves as guests at Wisdom’s banquet, their deepest hunger being satisfied with ‘the bread of understanding’ and their true thirst being slaked with ‘the water of wisdom’ (Sir. 15.3). The people of Israel had learnt from the story of the ‘bread from heaven’ given to the wilderness generation (Ps. 78.19-25; Neh. 9.15) that they had a deeper hunger that could be satisfied ‘not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Deut. 8.3). Similarly for Johannine believers, the gift of ‘everyday’ bread to sustain life – ‘the food that perishes’ (Jn 6.27) – shared generously at their community meal was an experience of ‘the gift of God’(4.10): the coming of the ‘Word from the mouth of God’ into the world as ‘living bread’ to sustain them in ‘eternal life’.

13. §5 Love one another (Jn 13.34) Judas has departed into the night, at Jesus’ bidding (Jn 13.27-30), in fulfilment of the Scripture, ‘The one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’ (13.18). This is another hint that the story of King David will illuminate the Evangelist’s story of Jesus. This ‘scripture’ is from the psalms, attributed at the time to David. In Jewish exegesis linking various psalms with events in his life, David was believed to have lamented the disloyalty of a close friend and table companion (Ps. 41.9; 55.1214) when the treachery of Achitophel became apparent at the time of Absalom’s coup (2 Sam. 15.31).19 Jesus’ later reference to Judas as ‘the one destined to be lost’ (Jn 17.12; RSV ‘the son of perdition’) may allude to a Jewish belief that Achitophel would have no share in the world to come (m. Sanh. 10.2). It is no accident that the first hint of Judas’ betrayal occurred in the context of negative reactions to Jesus’ offer to be for his disciples ‘the Bread of Life’ (Jn 6.64). Judas is an ex-disciple who initially received Jesus – who ate his bread, who had believed in him (8.31) – but subsequently rejected him, a familiar figure to Johannine believers living the experience of denunciation to the authorities (9.22; 12.42; 16.2), perhaps by former community members. As Jesus’ ‘table talk’ continues, we sense that Judas

19. Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 191–201.

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is actually cutting himself off from membership of the community of those who belong to Jesus. Jesus’ parting bequest to his own is his new commandment. ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another (Jn 13.34; 15.12). This is the only clear ethical imperative that the Johannine Jesus imposes on his followers although there are several other references to commandments of Jesus in the gospel (14.15, 21; 15.10). It is striking that the love command is phrased similarly to Jesus’ instruction about foot washing, ‘I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you’ (13.15), especially in the use of the conjunction kathōs. Used thirty-one times in the gospel, kathōs can mean simply ‘as’ – for example – ‘as the prophet Isaiah said’(1.23), ‘as it is written’ (6.31), ‘as is the burial custom of the Jews’ (19.40). On numerous occasions, however, kathōs occurs with reference to the apprenticed son who does nothing on his own, but only what he has learnt from his Father by watching him at work (Chapter 7, §4). ‘As I hear, I judge’ (5.30). ‘I speak these things as the Father has instructed me’ (8.28; see also 12.50). ‘I do as the Father has commanded me’ (14.31). Kathōs also features in numerous passages that speak of the replication of what we might call the ‘see-and-do-likewise’ dynamic in the relationship between Jesus and the disciples. As Jesus has kept the Father’s commandments, they must keep Jesus’ commandments (15.10). As the Father and Jesus are one, so the disciples must be one (17.11, 21, 22). As the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus sends his disciples (17.18; 20.21). Jesus’ new commandment exemplifies the full three-phase dynamic of Johannine ethics. As the Father has loved Jesus, Jesus has loved the disciples (15.9; 17.23) and now they must love one another kathōs – to the extent that, similarly to the way that – Jesus has loved them (13.34). The earliest commentator on the gospel understood well that the ethical response required of Johannine believers is much more than obeying a particular injunction. ‘Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment which you had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard’ (1 Jn 2 .7; see also 2 Jn 5). Earlier this author has defined that ‘word’ as the revelation of God in Jesus: ‘what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands’ (1 Jn 1.1). So the lovecommand to be obeyed is actually the whole story of Jesus, calling for a ‘see-anddo-likewise’ response. Loving one another as Jesus loved them is about seeing how Jesus persisted in doing the work the Father gave him to do in the world – giving and sustaining life – and about making a kathōs commitment. So Jesus says, ‘If anyone loves me, they will keep my word,’ and then goes on to explain, ‘The word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me’ (14.23-24). Jesus’ command ‘to love one another’, therefore, is not about a beleaguered sect concerned only for its own members. It is not limited to ‘resolute loyalty to the community of disciples’ as some social-scientific readings have proposed.20 It

20. W. Meeks, ‘The Ethics of the Fourth Evangelist’, in Exploring the Gospel of John: In Honor of D. Moody Smith (ed. R. A. Culpepper and C. C. Black; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), pp. 317–26 (323).

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does not ‘focus (or narrow down?) love of neighbour to love of brother’, as some suggest.21 The whole point of loving one another is to bear witness for the sake of the wider world, to the possibility of living life on Earth as the Creator intended. ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (13.35). As Michael Labhan has shown, this is a matter of testimony, providing compelling, practical evidence why people should also become members of a community open to inviting everyone in. ‘Care for one another includes care for outsiders.’22 It remains for us to consider, from our Earth-conscious perspective, how ‘one another’ might be a broad enough category to include the whole community of Earth with its interacting and mutually sustaining ecosystems. To interpret Jesus’ love command in this way would be to ‘extend to the cosmos theological claims that have been applied only to human beings (theological anthropocentrism) but that are valid for the entire universe’.23 Jn 3.16 would certainly imply that believers’ love should be as broad as God’s love for the whole kosmos (Chapter 5, §9). As we have seen (Chapter 12, §5) the Father has placed all things (Gk, panta) into Jesus’ hands (3.35; 13.3). Lifted up from the Earth, drawing all things to himself (12.32), Jesus brings everything that lives – plant, animal, human – within the ambit of God’s creating and sustaining influence. This is the work that Jesus models and sends his disciples to do. To the extent that they embrace their membership of that primary community and act lovingly within it, they will share in the work of Wisdom, she who ‘reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other’ and ‘orders all things well’ (Wis. 8.1).

13. §6 A home in the Father’s house (Jn 14.2) As Jesus’ long testamentary discourse continues he reassures his disciples that there are many dwelling places (Gk, monē: a place where one can dwell, an abode, a room) in his Father’s house and that he goes to prepare a place for them (Jn 14.2). In view of the gospel’s insistence that ‘eternal life’ begins here and now, he is clearly talking about an earthly experience of dwelling in the Father’s house, a closeness to God, similar to his.24 We have already learnt that ‘my Father’s house’ is Jesus’ term for the temple in Jerusalem (2.16), the site of God’s tent-pitching places (LXX: skēnōmata), where ‘even the sparrow finds a home’ (Ps. 84.1-3). We have also seen how the temple was a micro-kosmos, designed to symbolize the entire creation (Chapter 1, §5). However, Jesus also spoke of ‘the temple of his body’ (2.21), and of an hour to come when worship of the Father would be conducted not in any built temple, but

21. J. D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (3rd edn; London: SCM, 2006), p. xix. 22. Labahn, ‘It’s Only Love’, p. 22. 23. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. 151. 24. Brodie, The Gospel according to John, p. 463.

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‘in spirit and truth’ (4.21-24). The key to all of this is Jesus’ solemn warning, ‘If I do not go away’ – a euphemism for his death as in 13.1 – ‘the Advocate will not come to you’ (16.7; see also 7.39). The Spirit is the mode in which the Father and Jesus make their monē with the one who loves Jesus and keeps his word (14.23). And this is how believers can dwell in God’s house (Ps. 23.6) here and now. The Evangelist has several different terms for ‘home’: the oikos, one’s house (Jn 7.53; 11.20); the place where one is, such as Bethany where Lazarus was (12.1); ta idia, one’s own things, the place where one’s possessions are (16.32; 19.27); the place where one is staying (1.38-39; Gk, menō: abide, remain). All of these expressions speak of people’s sense of place, their experience of membership. Jesus compares it to a son’s sense of belonging in a household, something that a slave who ‘has no permanent standing’ lacks (8.35 NEB). When he encourages the disciples to abide in his love (15.10), or when he promises that the Spirit of truth will abide with the disciples and be in them (14.17), he is using language belonging to this semantic field to speak of the ‘at-home-ness’ that his death will make possible for the disciples. Thomas presumes that this home must be somewhere else, so he asks the way. When Jesus’ declares, ‘I am the way’ (14.6) and explains to Thomas and Philip that having seen him they have seen the Father, the here-and-now-ness of what he is offering to the disciples is clear.

13. §7 I am the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14.6) ‘The way’ (Gk, hodos) is a deeply scriptural motif that appears in several diverse New Testament writings (e.g. Mt. 3.3; Mk 10.52; Acts 9.2; 19.9; Heb. 10.20). Jesus’ self-identification as ‘the way’ may allude to the idea of walking in the way (of the commandments) as a condition for a flourishing life in the land (Deut. 5.33). It could also be connected to the preparation of ‘the way of the Lord’ in the wilderness (Isa. 40.3, cited in Jn 1.23), that is part of Isaiah’s vision for the renewal of the creation. No doubt it evokes the way of wisdom (Prov. 4.11; 23.19), the way of insight (Prov. 9.6), the way to wisdom (Job 28.13, 23). As we have seen (Chapter 2, §2; Chapter 4, §5), this understanding of ‘the way’ comes very close to the concept of the Logos. Since Wisdom herself is a ‘tree of life’ (Prov. 3.18), of whose fruits wisdom-seekers can eat their fill (Sir. 24.13-21), the pursuit of Wisdom is ‘a way of returning to the garden’.25 Thus for Philo, philosophy – the love of wisdom – is a way to the Tree of Life (QG 1.57). Again, as we have seen, this quest involves observation of ‘the way’ of the creation that frequently arouses admiration and respect for the Creator’s wisdom (Chapter 2, §1). In light of the Fourth Evangelist’s wisdom Christology and particular interest in the idea that the restoration will involve a return to Eden, it is possible that Jesus’ claim to be ‘the way’ refers to his reversal of the expulsion from paradise when ‘the way to the tree of life’ was barred (Gen. 3.24; Chapter 16, §6). All of this is inextricably connected with Jesus’ claim

25. Lanfer, Remembering Eden, p. 91.

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to be ‘the life’. John Ashton suspects that in the Fourth Gospel zōē ‘almost always carries some of the extra resonance already discernible in the symbol of the tree of life’.26 God’s word, spoken in Jesus, sets believers on a journey and maps out the way back to that garden where ‘every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food’ grows, with the tree of life at its centre (Gen. 2.9). This is not about nostalgia for a vanished golden age, but the promise of a future that, in one sense, is still to come and yet can be inhabited even now. Jesus’ claim to be ‘the truth’ (Jn 14.6) is another of those multifaceted Johannine motifs. Basically it has to do with the fidelity of ‘a God of steadfast love and faithfulness’ (Exod. 34.6), revealed, according to the Evangelist, in Jesus Christ (Jn 1.17). This fidelity is not just to Israel, not just to humanity, but to the whole creation. It is the faithfulness of the Lover of everything that lives, as described in the Book of Wisdom: For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours … you who love the living. (Wis. 11:24-26)

This is the truth that Jesus has heard from God (Jn 8.40) and that he wants his disciples to know (8.31-32). By way of a clarifying contrast, we might recall his earlier casting of the devil as ‘the father of lies’ and ‘a murderer from the beginning (8.44; Chapter 9, §7). Through his lies, the diabolos, the deceiver (see Rev. 12.9) brought death to Adam and Eve with its ‘knock-on’ effect for the whole creation. Those who do not stand in the truth show by their lethal ways that they belong to the devil (Jn 8.44). Jesus, however, as ‘the truth’ – the embodiment of God’s faithfulness to the whole creation – does his day’s gardening work in the Earth so that he might be ‘the life’, that everything entrusted to him by his Father (17.2) might flourish in abundant liveliness (10.10; Chapter 10, §5). Furthermore, he sends his disciples ‘to give life to the world’ just as he himself was sent (6.33).

13. §8 Even greater works (Jn 14.12) In the Scriptures, the ‘work of God’s hands’ includes not only creation (Gen. 2.2-3; Ps. 8.4), but all the deeds God did on behalf of Israel (Josh. 24.31; Isa. 60.21). The believers have seen the Father doing his ongoing creative and salvific work in the signs that Jesus has performed (Jn 14.9). Now Jesus promises, with a solemn ‘Amen, amen, I say to you’, that his going to the Father will make it possible for them to

26. Ashton, ‘Riddles and Mysteries’, p. 342.

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continue this work and even to do greater works (14.12). This brings us back to the saying about the apprentice-son who does what he sees the Father doing (5.19), also introduced by the solemn ‘Amen, amen’ formula. Both sayings exemplify what we have called the kathōs pattern: just as the Son sees and implements the Father’s life-affirming design for the creation, so the disciples see and implement the Son’s paradigm (see §5 above). ‘As their works are the works of Jesus, they will be just as much the activity of God in the world as his own acts were.’27 In fact, they will be even greater works, because through their witness Jesus’ work will be extended to the entire world and to every age. This is about nothing less than a new creation. This is not just about the signs that Jesus performed but about what they pointed to: the work that the Father has given Jesus to do, the whole task of making everything new (Rev. 21.5). Today’s Earth-conscious readers wonder how they might ‘do the work of God’ (Jn 6.28) in an ecologically devastated world. Empowering though Jesus’ promise that his disciples will do ‘even greater works’ is, it is also somewhat intimidating. However, twice in the narrative, as part of showing that everything Jesus does is ‘done in God’ (3.21), the Evangelist depicts him praying before performing one of his works (6.11; 11.41-42). Jesus tells disciples that as they undertake their work they too can ask the Father for whatever they need, adding, ‘If in my name you ask for anything, I will do it’ (14.13-14). This is where the Holy Spirit, another Paraclete (14.16), comes in as the mode in which Jesus can remain with them and empower them, even though he has gone away (16.7). Various translations bring out different facets of the Paraclete’s role (Gk. Paraclētos: helper, encourager, mediator, legal advocate). Paraclētos is a derivative of para-kaleō which can mean calling someone to one’s side (Gk, para, alongside). So the Paraclete is ‘the one who answers the call’,28 ‘the companionlike Spirit’29 who is with us on the way, however difficult the journey and challenging the task. The Paraclete, when called upon, comes to the community to provide help, counsel and encouragement by teaching them everything (Gk, panta: all things) and reminding them of all that Jesus has said to them (Jn 14.26). The Evangelist’s three asides about the disciples not seeing the significance of events until after Jesus was glorified (2.22; 12.16; 20.9) speak of the Paraclete’s presence during the early decades of the Jesus movement as believers grew in their understanding of who Jesus was, why he came, how the Scriptures bore witness to him (5.39, 46; 12.39-41) and how they should live as his disciples. When Jesus identifies the Paraclete with the Holy Spirit that he will breathe on the disciples (20.22) it becomes clear that his gift to his disciples is none other than the creating breath of God that made the clay figure of Adam into a living being (Gen. 2.7). That this enabling and empowering gift is ‘for ever’ (Jn 14.16) is surely all the encouragement that we need. Faced with

27. B. Lindars, The Gospel of John (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1972), p. 475. 28. J. Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004), p. 260. 29. Brodie, The Gospel according to John, p. 463.

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what Thomas Berry called ‘The Great Work’ of ecological responsibility, ‘We must believe that those powers that assign our role must in that same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfil this role. We must believe that we are cared for and guided by the same powers that brought us into being.’30

13. §9 My peace I leave with you (Jn 14.27) We come now to the conclusion of the original discourse where Jesus bequeaths to the disciples his parting gift of peace (Jn 14.27). This echoes the benediction by means of which priests put God’s name on the people of Israel. The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Num. 6.24-26)

The idea of peace as the light of God’s face (Ps. 4.6) shining in the world has shaped the gospel’s Prologue (Jn 1.5, 9) and its entire presentation of Jesus completing his day’s work before the light fades (Chapter 6, §2). Because in the Scriptures peace is part of a cluster of terms connected with God’s covenant with Israel (Isa. 54.10) – justice, righteousness and truth (e.g. Ps. 85.10; Isa. 32.15-17) – it is much more than the absence of conflict. It is something to be actively sought (Ps. 34.14) by speaking the truth and making true judgements (Zech. 8.16-17; see Jn 7.24; 16.13). In Hebrew thought, peace (Heb., shalom, peace, health, wholeness, well-being) conveys the idea of completeness: the order of the creation when God’s work was finished (Gen. 2.2), a state of harmony that was undermined once the diabolos set in motion the fracturing of the Earth community through murder, the flood’s destruction and the scattering of God’s children. In the new creation, God will send peace flowing like a river into Jerusalem (Isa. 66.12 LXX). This peace is the mark of the new heavens and new earth which the Lord will make (Isa. 66.22). So peace, shalom, embraces the notion of the restoration of the creation to justice, truth and righteousness. Peace is a blessing and a sign of the blessed life of the new creation just as it was the hallmark of the first creation.31

This is not peace ‘as the world gives it’ (Jn 14.27). We have yet to discuss what the Evangelist means by ‘the world’ (Chapter 14, §3). Suffice it at this stage to note that the gospel was written in an environment where Roman military power, both actual and legendary, was credited with achieving the empire’s ‘serene and

30. T. Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), p.7. 31. J. Healey, ‘Peace (Old Testament)’, in ABD V, pp. 206–7 (207).

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tranquil state of blessed peace’.32 Rome’s mission was ‘to impose the habit of peace’ (Virgil, Aeneid 1.279; 6.847-853).33 For Johannine believers, however, the peace that signalled the arrival of the age to come was not the Pax Romana – touted in Roman propaganda as Augustus’ achievement at the Battle of Actium – but the peace outbreathed on the disciples by the risen Jesus (Jn 20.22).

13. §10 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) The narrative setting for the foot washing and testamentary discourse is the last of many suppers that Jesus would have shared with his disciples. Dining has remained a defining ritual expression of faith in(to) Jesus to this day. However, in many of our churches a newcomer would be hard pressed to recognize the Eucharist as a community meal. The bread is often ‘shrivelled’ to an insubstantial waferfor-one, so that we can no longer even call it a loaf (Jn 6.9; Gk, artos: NRSV loaf ) let alone experience it being broken and generously shared.34 The wine is frequently withheld from all but the clergy. The people tend to be accommodated more like an audience in a theatre than a fellowship at table. That so many of us are prepared to accept this impoverishment of eucharistic symbolism is symptomatic of our failure to value ‘the mediated earthly matter of food and drink as of worth in itself, an Earth gift that mediates a divine gift’.35 The Shaker Elder Frederick Evans is remembered as saying, I want something solid and substantial. … I want to see the redemption of the stomach, redemption of the land; and the redemption of the creative forces of men and women. The first step in the work of human redemption is to make and eat good bread.36

Ecologically alert believers must demand that ‘real food and real drink’ (Jn 6.55, NEB) be shared at a liturgy that is recognizable as a communal meal. They may also find that moving (or even removing) furniture that impedes them from sensing that they are ‘gathered into one’ (11.52) at table with Jesus is, as Richard Giles insists, no ‘trivial pursuit’ but a ‘gospel imperative’.37

32. Carter, John and Empire, pp. 58–9. 33. Ibid., p. 169. 34. T. O’Loughlin, ‘Translating Panis in a Eucharistic Context: A Problem of Language and Theology’, Worship 78 (2004), pp. 226–35. 35. A. F. Elvey, The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), p. 176. 36. E. D. and F. Andrews, Fruits of the Shaker Tree of Life: Memoirs of Fifty Years of Collecting and Research (Stockbridge, MA: The Berkshire Traveller Press, 1975), p. 74. 37. R. Giles, ‘Moving the Furniture: Trivial Pursuit or Gospel Imperative?’, Search 38, 2 (2015), pp. 85–92.

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The foot washing is intended to produce concrete action modelled on it. The earliest commentary on the gospel is clear that loving one another is about deeds patterned on the template of Jesus’ ‘hour’ (1 Jn 3.11-24). Just as Jesus set an example, so must his disciples. It is as if Jesus were to say to Christian communities today, ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples’ (Jn 13.35): by the solar panels on your church roof, by the windmill or the biodiversity garden in your church grounds, by the ecological education that you foster, by your involvement in the campaign for climate justice. Expressions such as these of a love for one another that aspires to be as all-embracing as God’s love for the world (3.16) must be the mark of those who belong to Jesus. To be seen in the garden with Jesus is to be identified as one of his disciples (18.1, 26) Like Judas (Jn 13.27), we have been taking the bread of Earth’s sustenance and then going on to behave as defectors from our community. Now we are gradually learning – mainly through the damage we have caused – that we must replace ‘rupture’ with ‘re-membering’, that is, ‘claiming membership in the wholeness and holiness of the creation’.38  Therefore we must surely extend our understanding of the one explicit ethical command of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel – ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (13.34) – to include all of earthkind, our own ‘kin’, as the geneticists have shown us, from whom we must not turn away (Isa. 58.7). The remedy to the ecological crisis has to do with our sense of that community. As Ellen F. Davis insists, the highest agrarian priority is the cultivation of affectionate minds, ‘committed to the preservation and nurturing of the good, (no matter how small) …. When affection is fully developed, it becomes an economic disposition, orienting our desires to the Source of life.’39 To hear Jesus’ commission to his disciples to do ‘even greater works’ than he did is ‘to accept the challenge of becoming creators of ourselves and of the entire living world’.40 The Spirit inspires the inventiveness and resourcefulness through which human beings will minimize entropy in the climate system, mitigate ecological damage and adapt resiliently to the climate change that is now inevitable. There is ample evidence that the Spirit is at work in the world, stirring and encouraging people to be co-creators, rather than destroyers of the Earth. We have only to think of the elegant solutions that have already emerged in the field of ‘green architecture’  – sustainably constructed buildings with balconies or rooftops covered in plants – or the rise of alternative energy-generating methods with their potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or the development of a new jurisprudence to protect Earth’s commons and enshrine more-than-human rights in international law. For believers in Jesus, these are all ‘the works of God’ (Jn 6.28). ‘It is the Spirit that gives life,’ or to translate more literally, ‘that is the lifemaker’ (Gk, to zōopoioun; 6.63). We are to be agents of the God who ‘gives all life, is intimate to every movement, animates all action, fuels freedom, breaks down barriers, breathes dead bones dancing, irrigates the desert making flowers bloom’.41 38. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, p. 16. 39. Ibid., p. 138. 40. Gebara, Longing for Running Water, p. 67. 41. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 92.

Chapter 14 I S TILL H AVE M UCH TO S AY TO Y OU (JN 16.12)

Chapters 15 to 17 of the gospel contain Paraclete-prompted recollections and interpretations of what Jesus said (Jn 14.26) and, possibly, the utterances of Johannine prophets who addressed the community, gathered for its meal on the first day of the week (Jn 20.1, 19), in the name of the risen Lord. We focus on several features of this continuation of Jesus’ words while at table with his disciples that lend themselves to an Earth-conscious reading.

14. §1 The vine shall yield its fruit (Zech. 8.12) The redactional additions to the Last Discourse begin with the speech where Jesus says, ‘I am the vine you are the branches’ (Jn 15.5). The stress on the mutual indwelling (Gk, menō: abide, remain) of Jesus and the believer suggests that this may be the work of the redactor responsible for the eucharistic interpolation in the ‘Bread of Life’ discourse (6.51c-58) where similar use of the verb menō occurs (6.56). This would indicate the development of a symbolic understanding of wine drinking at the community meal as it became accepted practice (Chapter 8, §9). The saying about the vine (Gk, ampelos) and the branches (Gk, klēmata) is another ‘figure of speech’ (10.6; Gk, paroimia: parable, proverb) drawing on observation of the way the creation works with human collaboration. Chrys C. Caragounis has recently made a convincing proposal for a different translation, ‘I am vineyard, you are the vines.’ He explains that ‘in popular demotic Greek, by the third century BCE, ampelos could refer not to the vitis vinifera but to the plot of land, the vineyard, and klēma was no longer merely the branch or twig’.1 That would mean that the vinegrower uproots unproductive vines and burns them (see 2 Sam. 23.67; Wis. 4.5), but prunes the fruit-bearing vines to increase their yield.

1. C. C. Caragounis, ‘“Abide in Me”: The New Mode of Relationship between Jesus and His Followers as a Basis for Christian Ethics (John 15)’, in Rethinking the Ethics of John (ed. J. G. Van der Watt and R. Zimmermann: Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), pp. 250–67 (251–3).

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The vine flourishes vigorously in Israel, especially at higher altitudes where cooler temperatures make for a longer growing season. Well-established vines have deep roots and require less irrigation than other fruit crops. The edible lobed leaves of the vine are deciduous. The bare branches are pruned from mid-February to mid-March to ensure that those with most potential receive the full benefit of the terroir. Skilful pruning strikes a balance between letting the light in and protecting the grapes from over exposure to the hot sun. To this day, one can still see small fires here and there in eastern Mediterranean vineyards burning what has been pruned away from the vines. The minute greenish clustered flowers appearing in mid-April are followed by berries that develop into grapes and are harvested at various times from late August to mid-October. In the first century CE grapes were consumed fresh or dried into raisins and currants. The juice was made into wine or vinegar and the remainder of the plant was used for fodder and tannin.2

14. §2 My beloved had a vineyard (Isa. 5.1) Jesus explains that his Father is the ‘vinegrower’ (Jn 15.1 NRSV; Gk, geōrgos: farmer, gardener, one who engages in the cultivation of land; from gē: land and ergon: work), a familiar figure in both the story world and the world of the intended audience. A biblically knowledgeable audience would immediately have thought of Noah, the first geōrgos – NRSV ‘a man of the soil’. His planting of a vineyard when the flood receded was the first indication that life on Earth was being given a fresh start (Gen. 9.20). The audience would also have understood that God, revealed in Jesus, is the beloved who ‘had a vineyard … dug it, cleared it of stones’ and planted in it ‘choice vines’ (Isa. 5.1-7; 27.2-5). Psalm 80 would have come to mind as well: a plea for restoration of the ravaged vineyard with its broken-down walls where the ‘vine’ that God brought out of Egypt and transplanted into Canaan’s soil had formerly flourished. Jesus’ vine parable may also have recalled Ezekiel’s portrayal of God as the vinegrower who throws useless vine wood onto the fire (Ezek. 15.18; Jn 15.6). Whether Israel is ‘the vineyard of the Lord of hosts’ (Isa. 5.7) or a choice vine (Jer. 2.21) planted in the vineyard of the Earth, all of these intertexts presuppose the metaphor of the royal gardener (Chapter 1, §3). A dream vision in Pseudo-Philo’s work gives us an idea of how biblical ‘vine’ and ‘vineyard’ imagery was being interpreted in Palestinian synagogues around the turn of the era. God the gardener says, I will recall that time … when I said that the world would be created and those who would come into it would praise me. And I would plant a great vineyard, and from it I would choose a plant; and I would care for it and call it by my name, and it would be mine forever. (LAB 28.4-5)

2. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, p. 810.

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Here Israel is God’s ‘pleasant planting’ (Isa. 5.7) in the vineyard of the Earth (LAB 30.4; see also Rev. 14.18-19 with its explanatory genitive, hē ampelos tēs gēs; the vineyard that is the Earth). As we have seen, the Fourth Gospel is concerned with the restoration of Israel, the reintegration of estranged Israelites to reconstitute the twelve tribes under their own king, a new David. The prayer ‘concerning the cup’ in the Didachē reflects the belief that this hope has been fulfilled in Jesus. We give you thanks, our Father, For the holy vine of your servant David Which you revealed to us through your servant Jesus. To you [is] the glory forever. (Did. 9.2)3

This reconfiguration of Israel is for the sake of the world: not just other nations (Jn 12.20-23; Chapter 12, §1), but the more-than-human world as well (3.16; Chapter 5, §9). Elsewhere Pseudo-Philo presents Moses pleading with God in a prayer obviously based on Psalm 80, ‘If you do not have mercy on your vine, all things (sc. the creation of the world and its representation in the building of the temple) have been done in vain’ (LAB 12.8-9). So, the vineyard where God planted a choice vine, Israel, is a representation of the Earth. It has been ravaged, but God the geōrgos will restore it. As C. T. R. Hayward has shown in detail, the vine symbol is part of a whole set of beliefs about the temple.4 Apparently, at the time of Herod the Great’s building programme an enormous golden vine was set up at the entrance to the sanctuary. Josephus reports that its grape clusters were as tall as a man (J.W. 5.5; Ant. 15.11). People would donate a leaf, a grape or a whole bunch of golden grapes. It was accepted that the priests could use the gold to augment the temple treasury when the need arose (m. Mid. 3:8). The golden vine was intended to represent Israel, the vine planted by God on Mount Sion (Exod. 15.17; Ezek. 19.10-11; see also LAB 23.12), its roots going down to the waters of the cosmic abyss beneath the temple’s foundations and its branches reaching up to the heavens, a unifying force in the created order (LAB 18.10-11). Instead this artificial vine was the visible sign of the ostentatious wealth that separated the privileged Judean elite from their fellow Israelites. The Johannine reference to Jesus as ‘the true vine’ (or vineyard?) may well have this symptomatic golden vine in view, as might the reference in the Gospel of Thomas to a vine ‘planted without the Father’ that will be uprooted and will rot (Gos. Thom. 40).

3. A. Milavec, The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003), p. 23. 4. C. T. R. Hayward, ‘The Vine and its Products as Theological Symbols in First Century Palestinian Judaism’, DUJ 82 (1990), pp. 9–18; Hayward, The Jerusalem Temple, pp. 159–61; M. Barker, King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John’s Gospel (London: SPCK, 2014), pp. 423–4.

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A quotation from Norman Wirzba will help us to view all of the above within an eco-hermeneutical frame. God is continually in his garden creation, watering and feeding it, but also weeding and pruning it. God delights in the fruitfulness of its life, just as God expresses profound sorrow over its disease or death. God is continuously watchful and alert to the dangers that can disrupt the garden’s life. God is faithful even when the garden does not produce fruit as planned.5

14. §3 You do not belong to the world (Jn 15.19) The next section of the discourse concerns the world’s hatred for Jesus and his disciples. While following the gospel’s spiral path, we have encountered ‘the world’ (Gk. kosmos) in several different guises. ‘The world’, mentioned seventyeight times in the gospel, is ‘a term that has shifting semantic value’.6 Sometimes it can simply mean ‘everyone’ as in the Pharisees’ exasperated admission, ‘the world has gone after him’ (Jn 12.19), although there is also, no doubt, an ironic suggestion that faith in Jesus will actually spread to every corner of the known world. More usually in the gospel ‘the world’ means the whole Earth. This is ‘the world’ made and loved by God (3.16) that in our reading from an ecological perspective we are taking as the entire creation, all that exists (Chapter 5, §9). For the gospel’s intended audience, the kosmos was ‘this world’ (18.36), inasmuch as ancient people knew about it: the physical world, the home of everything that lives under the sun (Prov. 8.31; LXX, oikoumenē: inhabited world; from oikos: house and menō: dwell), the world into which human beings are born (Jn 16.21), as distinct from the heavenly realm above the skies. This is the world where Wisdom shed her light down the centuries (1.5, 9-13) and where the Logos eventually pitched his tent ‘among us’ (1.14; 3.19). In Johannine thought, the world is loved by God and not condemned (3.16-17). God’s desire is for its flourishing in abundant life (6.33). The gospel distinguishes between life in this world and ‘eternal life’, the life of the aeon (12.25), but insists that faith in Jesus makes that ‘eternal life’ liveable here in this world (Chapter 5, §8). Through his death Jesus leaves this world to return to the heavenly realm from which he came (6.62; 13.1; 16.28). Then there is ‘the world’ seen as a complex of values and practices that functions without any sense of accountability to God. This, of course, refers to people’s priorities and ethics. That is why there is such a thing as ‘the sin of the world’ (Jn 1.29) and why the peace that Jesus gives is so different from peace ‘as

5. Wirzba, Food & Faith, p. 63. 6. V. Balabanski, ‘John 1 – the Earth Bible Challenge: An Intra-textual Approach to reading John 1’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament (ed. N. C. Habel and V. Balabanski; Earth Bible 5. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 89–94 (90).

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the world gives’ (14.27), Caesar’s enforced pacification founded on oppression. This ‘world’ is personified in the figure of its ruler (16.11), whether ‘the evil one’ (17.15), or perhaps, as some suggest, the Roman emperor. The events of Jesus’ hour will show how wrong ‘the ruler of this world’ is (16.11). Because Jesus shines a light on the evil way this ‘world’ functions (3.19), it hates him (7.7.) and that hatred will fall on his disciples too, once they begin to do Jesus’ work (15.18-19). ‘But take courage,’ he tells them, ‘I have conquered the world’ (16.33). It would seem that the community behind the gospel had a strong sense of themselves as not belonging to ‘the world’ in this sense (17.16). This is not the ‘other-worldly’ attitude that is often blamed for modern Christians’ ecological insensitivity. In a way, the idea is more temporal than spatial – a contrast between this world and the world to come – except that, in the Johannine understanding, the world-tocome has come. ‘Eternal life’ – the life of the new aeon – is the real or true life that disciples of Jesus can live now, here in this world (Chapter 5, §8). It is often supposed that the Fourth Gospel is negative towards the world. Far from that, the gospel insists that, however dark ‘the world’ may seem, it is still the object of God’s desire to save. Jesus came to be the Saviour of the world (4.42), ‘to take away the world’s sin’ (1.29). Nevertheless, he warned that there will be people who prefer the darkness, not wanting the evil they are doing exposed (3.20). In the Johannine view, that is their decision (Gk, krisis: judgement), their ‘judgement call’. Jesus does not judge them (12.47); they judge themselves and they live with the consequences of their choice.

14. §4 The sin of the world (Jn 1.29) We have already touched on some ways in which the Johannine understanding of sin may help us diagnose the causes of our Earth’s ecological ills. We saw how Jesus’ taking away of the sin of the world (Jn 1.29) can be understood as the returning of the world from all its distortions to the state that the Creator intended (Chapter 3, §7). We noted that being a slave to sin (8.34) is a good description of our enthralment to various addictions that prevent us living in our Earth home in the freedom and respect for the freedom of others that befit a son or daughter of God’s house (Chapter 9, §6). Jesus’ words, ‘Now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains’ (9.41), can challenge our high-handed presumption of knowledge that permits us to be so casual about the environmental impact of our interventions (Chapter 10, §8). This section of the discourse picks up the theme of ‘the sin of the world’ (Jn 1.29) when Jesus says, ‘If I had not come and spoken to them’ and ‘If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not have sin’ (15.22, 24). ‘They’ are those who belong to ‘the world’, that system of values and practices that is antithetical to ‘the way’ of Jesus. They hate the disciples as they hate Jesus. In many ways they recall the ungodly in the Book of Wisdom whose values throw into relief the nature of authentic human living (Chapter 4, §5). These are the ones who go by the ‘might is right’ principle saying, ‘Let us enjoy the good things that

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exist, and make use of the creation to the full’ (Wis. 2.6-11). Their words fit well on the lips of those Johannine characters that ‘belong to the world’ (Jn 15.19). Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us. (Wis. 2.12-15)

When the lifted up and vindicated Jesus returns as ‘the Paraclete’, he will prove them wrong – wrong about sin, especially, because they did not ‘believe into’ Jesus (Jn 16.8-9); they lacked that performative faith that sees the work that Jesus does, recognizes it as the work of God and wants to be part of it. As Nicholas Lash explains, ‘Sin is not wickedness, as contrasted with virtue. The contrary of sin is not virtue but holiness, conformity to God.’7 That is why Jesus prays for his disciples, ‘Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth’ (17.17). If the Father’s word is the whole coming of Jesus into the world (1 Jn 1.1), then conformity to Jesus’ kathōs paradigm – ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ (Jn 13.34) – is holiness. If we regard the created world as nothing more than a bottomless resource to be exploited and commodified, we ‘summon death’ (Wis. 1.16) and will surely die in our sin (Jn 8.21). In our day, through the insights of great Christian leaders and theologians, the Holy Spirit is at work, convincing/convicting the world of its ecological sin (Jn 16.9).8 Increasingly theological definitions of sin mention the degrading of the integrity of the Earth. Sin is refusal of relation, self enclosure in a futile search for safety.… Spreading like a fungus from dying cities across the surface of the globe, its appearance is only the familiar bleak ugliness of egotism, of the attempt to transform other people, things, facts, institutions, ideas, dreams, into ‘our’ absolute and indestructible possessions.9

To the extent that we include the whole creation in the ‘one another’ that we are to love, Jesus takes away our ecological sin (1.29).

14. §5 A woman in labour has pain (Jn 16.21) Because Jesus has spoken about his impending death, sorrow has filled the disciples’ hearts (Jn 16.6). Jesus assures them that his departure will be only for ‘a little while’ 7. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 100. 8. Laudato Si’, 8. 9. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 101.

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and that when they see him again their pain will turn into joy (16.19-20). The ‘little while’ corresponds to the interim period, envisaged in other strands of the Jesus movement, between Jesus’ resurrection and his imminently expected coming in glory when God will bring in the new aeon (Acts 3.20-21; 1 Cor. 15.25-28). The Paraclete is the Johannine solution to the apparent deferral of this parousia that would seem to have been quite a critical setback for the early Jesus believers. It is as the Paraclete that Jesus returns to the disciples, changing their sorrow into a joy that will never be taken from them (Jn 16.20, 22). Johannine Jesus followers, therefore, are not waiting until the end of this age to be born into the life of the age to come. Zoē aiōnios is theirs even now. A final figure (Gk, paroimia) in the gospel addresses this issue. Of all the parablelike analogies in the gospel, this one can only come from women’s experience of labour pain and of how it recedes in the memory as the joy of childbirth sets in (Jn 16.21). It must reflect, therefore, the insights of the women who contributed to the shaping of Johannine theology. In the apocalyptic scenarios of first century CE Judaism, the onset of wars, catastrophes and natural disasters would be the ‘birth pangs’ of the new aeon (Mk 13.8; Mt. 24.8; 1 Thess. 5.2-3). This imagery has a scriptural background. Prolonged labour (Jer. 4.31), labour with no birth (Isa. 26.17-18), giving birth to ‘an infant that lives but a few days’ (65.20) or bearing children for calamity (65.23), all describe the distress of waiting for a promised deliverance that seems to delay. Looking at the more positive birth imagery in Isa. 66.7-13, it is instructive to see that the child that Daughter Jerusalem delivers, after a surprisingly brief and pain-free labour (66.7), who ‘drinks deeply with delight from her glorious bosom’ (66.11), and whom she nurses, carries and dandles on her knees (66.12) is actually ‘a land … born in one day’, ‘a nation … delivered in one moment’ (66.8). For Isaiah, this ‘birth’ is the creation of ‘a new heavens and a new earth’ when, as with women’s experience of childbirth, the previous ‘labour’ will not be remembered or come to mind (65.17). The Isaian vision of the definitive establishment of the reign of God as a re-birthing of the world clearly underlies this Johannine paroimia. In fact, Kathleen Rushton sees in Jn 16.21 an evocation of the whole story of the ‘daughter of Zion’ as told in Isaiah 40–66.10 Commentary on the ‘new creation’ motif in the Fourth Gospel has conventionally focused on Jesus’ breathing on the disciples (Jn 20.22) as an allusion to Gen. 2.7. However, birth imagery is another way in which the Evangelist models the new creation on the first creation. Norman Habel, in his commentary on Genesis in this series, suggests that the appearance of the dry land out of the waters on day three of the first creation (Gen. 1.9) is a birth. In support of this reading, he notes the birth imagery in other biblical ‘creation narratives’: Ps. 90.2 – with its reference to the mountains being born and Earth being ‘brought forth in labour’ – and Job

10. K. P. Rushton, ‘On the Crossroads between Life and Death: Reading Birth Imagery in John in the Earthquake-Changed Regions of Otautahi Christchurch’, in Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania (ed. J. Havea, D. J. Neville and E. Wainwright; Atlanta: SBL, 2014), pp. 57–72 (65–6).

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38.8 ‘where sea comes forth from a primal womb’.11 The Septuagintal version of Job 38.8, where the sea bursts ‘out of its mother’s womb’ (Gk, ek koilias mētros autēs) is even more explicit. As we have seen, birth imagery is quite a feature of the Fourth Gospel. Even before the coming of Jesus, those receptive to the light of divine Wisdom/Logos shining in the world could be ‘born of God’ (Jn 1.12-13). Jesus’ arrival opened up the possibility of being born again ‘of water and Spirit’ (3.3-8). As we will see, it is when the waters burst forth from the crucified Jesus’ opened side (19.34), that it becomes clear that the ‘rivers of living water’ that he promised would flow from his koilia are birth waters (7.37-38; Chapter 16, §1–§2). The paroimia about the woman in labour brings all this birth imagery together. So the human being (Gk, anthrōpos) whose birth into the world transforms pain into joy is humankind created anew as part of a re-birthing of the whole creation. For the Fourth Evangelist, the child born ‘in a little while’ (Isa. 66.7-8) represents the whole creation made new in one hour, ‘the hour’ of Jesus.

14. §6 That your joy may be complete (Jn 16.24) The birth parable concludes Jesus’ address to the disciples on a note of joy that will be sustained into his final prayer to the Father (Jn 17.13). Jesus makes two promises: having their pain turned into joy when they see him again, and receiving from the Father anything they ask for in his name that their joy may be full (16.2122, 24). This brings us back to the beginning of the Johannine story of Jesus: the witness of John and his joy at the sound of the bridegroom’s voice (3.29). Twice in the gospel Jesus speaks of his own joy that he wants the disciples to share (15.11; 17.13). We have seen how, in his alacrity to do the day’s work in the Earth that Father has given him to do, Jesus is like the sun-bridegroom, rejoicing to run his course (Ps. 19.4-6; Chapter 6, §2). The sorrow of the disciples at his impending departure (Jn 16.6) must surely show that in his presence there was ‘fulness of joy’ (Ps. 16.11). The disciples’ sharing of Jesus’ own joy has to do with their status as friends and not slaves (Jn 15.15). As they undertake the work he sends them to do, they will be eager, like the son who delights in doing the work he has seen his Father do, not like the slave (5.19-20; 8.35) who ‘obeys blindly, without insight into the command of his lord, and without the joyful understanding heart of a friend’.12 There are two ‘beatitudes’ (from Gk, makarios: blessed, happy, with the implication of enjoyment) in the Fourth Gospel. ‘Blessed are you if you do these things,’ that is, if you follow Jesus’ example (Jn 13.17). ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’ (20.29). Going by what we have seen of the performative nature of Johannine faith, these two beatitudes say the same thing in different ways. Gēorgia – farming, gardening, the cultivation of land – is the work that God the Gēorgos (15.1) delights in doing and that was Jesus’ ‘food’ (4.34).

11. Habel, The Birth, The Curse and the Greening, p. 31. 12. Haenchen, John, II, p. 132.

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If our doing–making–creating, whatever form it may take, is the expression of our faith in Jesus, our performance of this work will be suffused with the joy and delight that is the mark of Wisdom at play in the world (Prov. 8.30-31).

14. §7 That they may all be one (Jn 17.21) We have already touched on several of the themes that are threaded through John 17, the long speech that Jesus – apparently out of doors looking up at the night sky (Jn 17.1; see 13.30) – addresses to the Father. In this section we focus on his prayer for the disciples and for those who will come to faith in him through their words: ‘that they may be one’ (17.11, 20-21). This is another instance of that see-and-do-likewise dynamic (Chapter 13, §5). They are to be one (11.52), just as (kathōs) the Father and Jesus are one (10.30). This vision of unity cannot but speak to us today of what is perhaps the most important lesson that we are learning as our ecological awareness develops: the interconnectedness of everything on Earth. In keeping with our Earth-conscious reading of the Evangelist’s expressions ‘all things’ and ‘all flesh’ as inclusive of the more-than-human (Chapter 12, §5), it is equally valid to hear ‘that they may all be one’ as people who need to relearn that they are part of a unity. We (western) humans have, over several centuries now, been living by a myth that we are somehow separate from and even superior to what we have until quite recently been thoughtlessly calling ‘the natural world’. As if we were not part of it ourselves! This distancing of ourselves from what we named ‘nature’ – an intellectual construct with no basis in reality – has permitted us to become the parasitic and predatory force that we are in the Earth. This is what the Johannine Jesus would call not standing in the truth (Jn 8.44) and, as he makes clear, it results in the quenching of life. If Jesus’ twenty-first-century disciples are to be ‘sanctified in truth’ as Jesus prays they will be (17.19), they have much learning to do about relatedness and interconnectedness.

14. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God?’ (Jn 6.28) Jesus invites his disciples to think of his God and theirs (Jn 20.17) as a geōrgos, a worker with the soil (15.1). This means that farm work, gardening, the land management of the forester, the conservation work of the wild life ranger, the work of city planners and managers that integrates nature and culture well in an urban environment are all the ‘works of God’ that disciples of Jesus are sent to do. Ben Sira says that farm work (Gk, geōrgia) was created by the Most High (Sir. 7.15). Wendell Berry regards a farmer’s good use of land as ‘a religious practice’ and, conversely, the abuse of land as ‘blasphemy’.13 Even if our ‘garden’ is no more than a few pot

13. Cited by E. Davis in Scripture, Culture and Agriculture, p. x.

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plants on a window sill, we can still be gardeners at heart. Real farmers and real gardeners are wise enough to respect ‘the way’ of the creation, to learn from it, to mimic it, to cooperate with it. Gardeners who compost know that death is ‘the only possible soil out of which life can come’.14 Gardeners can never forget that they are part of the Earth community. ‘When I garden’, writes one of them, ‘earth and earthworm pass between my fingers and I realize that I am made of the same stuff.’15 Even though they work hard to make their garden productive, they know that everything that grows in it is sheer gift. Gardeners love their gardens and are extremely protective towards them. They do not want help from someone who does not love gardening and is likely to take ‘short cuts’. Neither do gardeners want to eat fresh strawberries all year long, not just because of the ‘food miles’, but because they love Earth’s seasonal rhythms and know how foolish it is to spurn them, ‘to pretend it is always time for everything’.16 Christophe Boureux writes of how gardening teaches us to wait, because we cannot rush the seasons, to get to know our place as our garden’s appreciative geographers, to recognize that we live in a world of hospitality provided by all creatures, to see our garden as a representation of ‘the theatre of creation’ and to understand that we live in a shared world.17 Leonardo Boff describes the myth that we, in the so-called developed countries, have been living by up until now as ‘the logic that devastates the earth and plunders its wealth, showing no solidarity with the rest of humankind and with future generations’. This logic shatters ‘the fragile balance of the universe built up with great wisdom by nature throughout fifteen billion years of labour’.18 When writing and speaking in his native Brazilian Portuguese, Boff frequently calls for re-ligação, re-ligation, re-connection, using a wordplay on the Portuguese word for religion, religião, that is derived, as is the English word ‘religion’, from the Latin verb religare, to bind or tie up, to connect.19 One of the most common themes in religious discourse is the experience of union with the divine and with the whole creation. The pre-scientific insights of generations of mystics from all religious traditions concur with the findings of modern physics and cosmology that there is a profound unity about the universe. We now know about the origin that we share with everything that exists in the miniscule sphere of matter, ‘that unimaginably incandescent point of energy’,20 from which the universe flared forth fifteen billion years ago. Our knowledge has been enhanced by the work of

14. R. F. Capon, Food for Thought: Resurrecting the Art of Eating (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 155. 15. V. Guroian, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999), p. 7. 16. Capon, Food for Thought, p. 113–14. 17. C. Boureaux, Dieu est aussi jardinier: La Création, une écologie accomplie (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2014). 18. Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, p. xi. 19. Ibid., p. xi. 20. Ibid., p. 43.

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biologists and geneticists. ‘Each species … is the unique living embodiment of an evolutionary journey as long as our own, a journey that has a common starting point with ours, and like ours is an ongoing journey.’21 As we have seen, this understanding resonates powerfully with the Jewish belief that before the world’s creation ‘God was the only reality and therefore all of reality was one’22 (Chapter 2, §3). Jesus’ prayer, ‘that they may all be one’, invites us today to rethink faith in light of an ecological crisis that calls for a whole new way of being Christian. Thus for Nicholas Lash, a theologian who began rethinking decades ago, believing in(to) Jesus means ‘pledging ourselves to work towards that comprehensive healing, onemaking or at-one-ment, of us and all the world, by which all things are brought to share the unimaginable singleness or harmony which is God’s alone.’23 Because everything is linked in some way, a small act of environmental irresponsibility can have an unimaginably serious ‘butterfly effect’. We might think, for example, of the build-up of microplastics in the world’s seas and consequently in the food web, as a result of numerous small acts of carelessness in the disposal of waste. However, the interconnected unity of the creation also points to the positive effect of many people making small lifestyle choices. If we were all to undertake those little actions recommended in Laudato Si’ – wearing warmer clothes in winter in order to use less heating, avoiding the use of plastic and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, making a preferential option for public transport, turning off unnecessary lights, planting trees, etc. – a positive and Earth-healing change would most certainly come about.24

21. Feehan, ‘The Garden God walked in’ p. 62. 22. Goshen-Gottstein, ‘Creation’, p. 114. 23. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 25. 24. Laudato Si’, par. 211.

Chapter 15 L OVE I S AS S TRONG AS D EATH (SONG 8.6)

This chapter deals with the events of the hour from the moment where Jesus says to the disciples at table with him, ‘Rise, let us be on our way’ (Jn 14.31) to his death on the cross.

15. §1 Across the Kidron Valley (Jn 18.1) After their meal, Jesus and ‘his own’ (Jn 13.1) go to a place outside Jerusalem where there is a garden. The Evangelist makes a point of saying that Jesus often met there with his disciples (18.1-2). To get to the garden, they have to cross what the NRSV translates as ‘the Kidron Valley’. It is actually the stream bed of the Kidron (Gk, cheimarros: a wadi, a rainy-season stream that flows only during the winter). In the days ‘before the feast of the Passover’ (13.1), it would have been more or less dry. Jesus’ crossing of it stirs up memories of King David fleeing from Jerusalem when Absalom was trying to take over the throne. Leaving the city where so many are plotting against him, the king and the few still loyal to him pass over ‘the cheimarros of the Kidron’, and go into hiding in the wilderness of Judea (2 Sam. 15.19-23). It is a pathetic little procession; King David and his followers are weeping and David himself goes barefoot with his head covered (15.30) like someone in mourning. As we have seen (Chapter 12, §3), this is when Ittai declares his loyalty to David, ‘whether for death or for life’ (15.21). The audience for the gospel may already have thought of that scene when they heard Jesus’ saying, ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also’ (Jn 12.26). The portrayal of Judas as an Achitophel figure would also have alerted them to similarities between David’s and Jesus’ stories (Chapter 13, §5). So when Jesus leaves the city with his little group of followers, prepared to ‘die with him’ (11.16; 13.37), but actually about to abandon him (16.32; see 2 Sam. 17.1-3), an alert audience would notice that he is retracing the journey of David, forced to leave his royal city where – in reasoning uncannily like that of Caiphas (Jn 11.49-50) – it has been determined that the death of one man will be for the benefit of the whole nation (2 Sam. 17.1-3). Even the differences between Jesus and David would have spoken volumes. When Jesus crosses the Kidron, he is not weeping. He is not praying, ‘Father, save me from this hour’ (Jn 12.27). He is not

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going into the wilderness, but into a garden. As we found with the young donkey (12.14) and the palm branches (12.13) that ‘made the point’ (Chapter 11, §9 and §10), here a feature of the land, the dry bed of a winter flowing stream, is sending out a signal. Whether through resemblances or contrasts, it is the crossing of the Kidron by the shepherd-king about to lay down his life for the sheep that identifies him as the promised ‘one shepherd’ of ‘one flock’ that in Ezekiel’s prophecies God names as ‘my servant David’ (Ezek. 34.23-24; 37.25).

15. §2 A place where there was a garden (Jn 18.1) The setting of Jesus’ arrest in an unnamed garden (Gk, kēpos), across the wadi Kidron, that he has previously frequented with his disciples is unique to the Fourth Gospel (Jn 18.1-2). A garden is mentioned or implied a further three times in the narrative of the hour. Being seen in the garden with Jesus identifies Peter as one of Jesus’ disciples (18.26; Chapter 13, §10). There is ‘a garden in the place where [Jesus] was crucified’ with a new tomb in it where his friends can lay his body (19.41-42). And Mary takes Jesus for the gardener (20.15). Thus the events of ‘the hour’ all happen in or near a garden. The Evangelist’s vagueness about whether they happen in the same garden points the audience in a figurative direction. Nicolas Wyatt suggests that ‘when we come to the use of the garden motif in John’s gospel, it is not only futile, but misdirected to attempt to locate it’.1 While this is true, to some extent, the garden is not entirely ‘utopian’. It is the king’s paradise (Chapter  1, §3), reached by steps going down from Jerusalem into the Kidron valley, that can still be seen today.2 The delineation of its extent, however, is a work of the theological imagination, and certainly not exact cartography. The ‘royal garden’ setting is part of the Fourth Evangelist’s distinctive way of recounting a disturbing narrative of injustice, torture, degradation and murder. The physical reality of Jesus’ suffering is not overlooked, but neither is it emphasized. A story of cruelty is suffused with what the gospel calls Jesus’ ‘glory’. In keeping with this, several details of the brutalities inflicted on Jesus, according to the synoptic tradition, are omitted. The Johannine Jesus is not abandoned by all his disciples. Far from experiencing forsakenness, he remains assured that the Father is with him (Jn 8.29; 16.32). He is not taunted while ‘lifted up’ on the cross. In fact, in comparison with the strident atmosphere of mockery and shouting in the synoptics, there is a reverent stillness about the crucifixion scene, as if the Evangelist is inviting the audience to look silently and contemplatively at what the whole gospel has been building towards, whether by signs or narration. ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced’ (19.37; Zech. 12.10).

1. N. Wyatt, ‘Supposing Him to be the Gardener (Jn 20.15)’, ZNW 81 (1990), pp. 21–38 (31). 2. Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, p. 251.

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The opening scene prepares the audience to ‘suspend disbelief ’ and allow the narrative – and, in particular, the garden – to speak at a symbolic level. Judas is rather improbably portrayed as bringing an enormous crowd with him. The NRSV ‘detachment of soldiers’ translates the Greek word speira: a cohort; one-tenth of a legion, so 600 Roman soldiers under the command of a high ranking officer (Jn 18.12; Gk, chiliarchos: a tribune, a captain of 600–1000 men). There are also servants (Gk, hypēretas: retainer, attendant, assistant) of the Jewish authorities (18.3). Their lamps and torches – a distinctively Johannine touch – emphasize the darkness (13.30); their weapons, the atmosphere of menace. Jesus comes out (18.4; Gk, exēlthen), a subtle hint that this is a walled garden with symbolic ‘potential’ as a paradeisos. When he replies to their demand for him with his majestic egō eimi, this huge force falls backwards to the ground. The words echo David’s in a psalm that the Septuagint links with his anointing by Samuel: ‘When evildoers assail me … they shall stumble and fall backwards’ (Ps. 27.2). The divine name that the Father has given to Jesus (Jn 17.11-12; Chapter 8, §6) throws his adversaries into total disarray. Then, not so much being arrested as freely stepping forward and offering himself, the royal shepherd ensures the safety of the sheep that the Father has given him (18.8-9; 10.28) and goes freely to lay down his life (Jn 10.11, 15, 17; 15.13). As this cold night progresses (18.18) and turns to dawn (18.28), Jesus will be brought from a garden to two sites where nothing grows because Earth’s soil has been beaten down and paved over with plaster and stone: the courtyard of the High Priest’s house (18.15) and the ‘stone pavement’ called Gabbatha in the Roman praetorium (19.13).

15. §3 Hail, King of the Jews! (Jn 19.3) The hearing with Pilate drags in narrative slow motion compared with the pace of the rest of the gospel: six hours, from ‘early in the morning’ (Jn 18.28) to noon (19.14). It is the Roman procurator who first uses the ‘king’ word. Jesus replies that ‘King’ is Pilate’s word, not his (18.37; see NEB). Kingship as Pilate knows it is not how either God or Jesus acts. Nicholas Lash writes of a deep current flowing through the Scriptures according to which, God is declared to be precisely not a king or shepherd, landowner or lover, judge or father, as the others are. The things we say of God are said in criticism of our inhuman, and hence ungodly, practices … . It is, therefore, only through the redemptive transformation of our human practices that we discover what these images might mean when used as metaphors for our relation to the unknown God.3

For the Evangelist, it is the sight of Jesus in mock royal regalia, having just undergone a Roman scourging and about to lay down his life, that shows what the word ‘king’ means (19.14).

3. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 44.

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The ‘crown of thorns’ (NRSV) that the soldiers weave or plait and put on Jesus’ head (Jn 19.2) has conventionally been understood as an instrument of torment, especially by gospel-harmonizing readers. A thorny bramble bush was accordingly named Ziziphus spina-christi by Linnaeus.4 However, the Evangelist may have had in mind a crown made out of spikes radiating outwards from the head in imitation of the corona radiata seen on coins and other representations of the Roman emperor, identifying him with the sun god. If this is what the Evangelist had in mind, the spiky crown could even have been made from the pointed fronds of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera).5 The word akantha means a thorn or a spike and thence any thorny plant. In the plural it is used for the spines of the hedgehog (Gk, akanthiōn) and of certain fish, both obviously with spikes pointing outwards. In view of the Fourth Gospel’s tendency to underplay the aspect of torture in favour of a presentation of Jesus’ crucifixion as royal exaltation, the corona radiata may be the preferable interpretation. Having crowned Jesus, the soldiers throw a purple mantle (Gk, himation: a rectangular piece of cloth worn draped around the body) around him, and enact a mock royal enthronement ritual (Jn 19.1-3). In ancient societies, clothing was a significant indicator of economic, political and religious standing. In the GrecoRoman world, cloth dyed purple was a luxury item, prized for its brilliance and colourfastness, and so clothing made from it indicated high status (1 Macc. 10.20; Lk. 16.19). Josephus mentions that Herod the Great wore purple (Ant. 14.173). The dye, first produced by the Phoenicians, was made from the secretion of a marine snail found in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the purple dye murex (Bolinus brandaris). The snails were collected in their thousands and boiled for several days in lead vats, producing an unpleasant odour that could linger in the dyed cloth, but yielding the ‘Tyrian purple’ that was so highly prized and that made the purple dye trade such a profitable business (Acts 16.14). The adjective ‘purple’ (Gk, porphurous) actually referred to a range of hues from a red to a blackish purple. The garment put on Jesus may be the purple-red chlamys (Mt. 27.28) that was part of a Roman officer’s garb.6 This would be a cheaper garment, dyed with one of the ‘imitation’ purples that were ‘derived from a variety of animals, vegetables or minerals’.7 At the symbolic level, however, this is no fake purple robe, but a garment fit for a king. As we have come to expect, this ‘investiture’ of Jesus in pseudo-royal regalia is full of irony that continues in the apparently intentional ambiguity as to whether Pilate or Jesus is sitting on the ‘judge’s bench’ (Gk, bēma; Jn 19.13). There is no doubt that Jesus puts Pilate on trial. A passage in Justin would suggest that this point was well taken in second-century Rome. ‘As the prophet said, “They placed him in mockery on the judgement seat and said, Judge us!”’ (1 Apol. 35.6). Similarly according to the Gospel of Peter, ‘They put him in a purple robe and set

4. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, p. 805. 5. Haenchen, John, II, p. 181. 6. Edwards, ‘Dress and Ornamentation’, p. 236. 7. F. W. Danker, ‘Purple’, ABD V, pp. 557–60 (558).

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him on the judgement seat and said, “Judge righteously, O King of Israel”’ (Gos. Pet. 2.7). In fact, Pilate never actually delivers a judgement. The irony is sustained in the solemn and public nature of the tri-lingual proclamation of Jesus’ kingship that Pilate, the official representative of the Empire, writes and refuses to change.

15. §4 It was the day of Preparation for the Passover (Jn 19.14) The Evangelist’s ironic observation that the people bringing Jesus to Pilate were so concerned about ritual purity that they would not enter the Roman headquarters provides the audience with significant information: that this is happening early in the morning on the eve of Passover (Jn 18.28). This is one of several moments when the Evangelist suggests that keeping the Passover festival in mind will help the audience to understand that in the events of ‘the hour’ Jesus will ‘pass-over’ from this world to the Father (13.1) and that this will change the meaning of Passover for his disciples. He will be condemned to crucifixion at noon on this ‘day of Preparation for the Passover’ (19.14). As he hangs on the cross, pilgrims will be bringing their paschal lambs to the temple to be ritually slaughtered there to the accompaniment of the singing of the ‘Egyptian Hallel’ (Ps. 113-118) by the levitical choir. The narrative of the hour opened with ‘Now before the festival of the Passover …’ (13.1). Pilate offers to release a prisoner because it is Passover (18.39). Jesus drinks sour wine from a sponge held up to his mouth on a branch of hyssop, a plant with strong Passover associations (19.29-30). The reference to the ‘day of preparation’ in the burial scene (19.31) is yet another reminder of the festival. Even the haste to remove Jesus’ body, so that it will not remain until the next day – Passover falling that year on a Sabbath – could be a further hint (see Exod. 12.10). Here we focus on the Passover resonances that the mention of hyssop activates. The incident set in motion when Jesus says, ‘I thirst’ (Jn 19.28) recalls his earlier request for a drink at the sixth hour (4.6-7) and, as then, shows him experiencing the common lot of earthlings: the need for hydration because water is essential to life. To accept this drink – thereby expressing his acceptance of ‘the cup’ that the Father has given him (18.11) will be Jesus’ last action before he dies, marking the completion of his work and the fulfilment of ‘the scripture’. Ever since the first Passover in Egypt, hyssop was used for sprinkling the blood of the Passover lamb on the lintel and doorposts of the homes where the Passover meal was being eaten (Exod. 12.21-22). Hyssop (Origanum syriacum/Origanum aegyptiacum) is an aromatic plant, belonging to the same family as oregano and marjoram, that can flourish in dry, rocky soil and can even sprout in a wall (1 Kgs 4.33). It grows to a height of about 30 cm. Hyssop leaves are covered with a soft cottony down that retains moisture when a bunch of hyssop sprigs are tied together to make a brush for sprinkling.8 Its stems are straight but hardly long or strong enough to lift

8. Tyas, Flowers from the Holy Land, p. 94. C. Boureux, Les plantes de la Bible et leur symbolique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2001), pp. 68–9; Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, ABD II, p. 812.

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a drenched sponge to the lips of someone ‘lifted up’ in crucifixion. A reed (as in Mk 15.36 and Mt. 27.48) would make more sense. It is not surprising that some copyists ‘solved’ this problem (Gk, hyssos: javelin, found in P476). The Evangelist has obviously introduced hyssop for reasons to do with symbolism. There is a further evocation of Passover in the Scriptural quotation, ‘None of his bones shall be broken’ (Jn 19.36). This is one of two scriptures that explain an event of great consequence to the Evangelist, who interrupts the narrative to address the audience, assuring them several times over that their faith is founded on authentic and trustworthy testimony to it (19.35). The event is the flow of water from Jesus’ opened side, to be discussed below Chapter 16, §1). Here we focus on the ‘non-event’ that prepared for it: that Jesus was spared the breaking of the legs, customarily inflicted to hasten death. The scripture seems to be a reference to the instructions concerning the Passover lamb. ‘You shall not break any of its bones’ (Exod. 12.46; see also Num. 9.12). Verbally, however, the quotation is closer to a passage in the psalms describing God’s care for the afflicted righteous one: [The Lord] keeps all his bones; Not one of them is broken. (Ps. 34.20 RSV)

The expanded version of the instructions for the Passover meal found in Jubilees explains that no bone of the lamb is to be broken ‘because no bone of the children of Israel will be broken’ (Jub. 49.13). This would seem to indicate that the unbroken bones of the Passover lamb were interpreted in light of Ps. 34.20 that tells of God’s deliverance of a righteous person from all his afflictions so that not one of his bones is broken. In Hebrew thought, the bones represent a person’s most profound level of being (Ps. 6.2; 31.10; 51.8). Thus the worst fate psalmists could wish for their enemies was for their shattered bones to be strewn about (2.9; 53.5; 141.7). By the Evangelist’s time, Ps. 34.20 would have been interpreted in light of developing beliefs that the reality symbolized by the bones continued to exist beyond death (2 Kgs 13.20-21; Sir. 49.10). As the concept of ‘the resurrection’ gained ground in Second Temple Judaism (Dan. 12.2), it included the idea, based on Ezekiel 37, that broken bones would prevent a person’s participation in it. For that reason, Ps. 34.20 is cited in rabbinic prayers for the deceased.9 Thus the audience for the gospel may well have seen the preservation of Jesus from the violation of the crurifragium as a pledge of his resurrection.10 The Johannine allusions to Passover recall John the Witness’s identification of Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’ (Gk, ho amnos tou theou; Jn 1.29, 36). However, this does not necessarily require us to see Jesus as the Passover lamb, especially since the word amnos is not used for the paschal lamb in the Scriptures (e.g. probaton in Exod. 12.21,

9. D. Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London: Athlone Press, 1956), p. 309. 10. For more detail on the quotation of Ps. 34.20 in Jn 19.36, see Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 229–40.

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pascha in Num. 9.9-12 and 1 Cor. 5.7). The Passover echoes in the account of ‘the hour’ are more subtle than that, just as the title ‘the Lamb of God’ is a polyvalent symbol.11 As we have seen, the lamb symbol points not only to elements of the Exodus Passover story in the account of Jesus’ ‘hour’ but also to other stories: the servant who goes to his death as a lamb led to slaughter (Isa. 53.7), the exalted lamb that becomes the bellwether of God’s flock (1 Enoch 89.45-48), the lamb that God provided in the Akedah story (Gen. 22.8, 13; Chapter 3, §7). It is important to interpret the title ‘Lamb of God’ in a way that is consonant with the Johannine understanding of Jesus’ hour. As we have seen, the Lamb’s task of taking away the sin of the world (Jn 1.29) can readily be understood as the returning of the world from all its distortions to the state that the Creator intended, a renewal of the kosmos that, it was believed, would happen at Passover time, when the Zodiac sign of Taleh/Aries was in the ascendant (Chapter 3, §7). It may also be significant that hyssop was used for sprinkling in the rituals for declaring a leper or a leprous (fungous) house clean (Lev. 14) and for purifying people who had been in contact with the dead (Num. 19.16-18). Hyssop, therefore, was employed in liturgies that expressed a passage from death to life, freeing people from whatever contamination had separated them from the community and restoring them to membership (Ps. 51.7).

15. §5 A sponge full of wine (Jn 19.29) We should also note the role of two other Earth elements in this scene: the ‘sour wine’ (NRSV) and the sponge. The sour wine (Gk, oxos; cf. Gk, oinos: wine) is rough, cheap, sour grape wine, typically drunk by the poor. Better quality wine might have salt, herbs, spices, raisins or date honey added to improve the taste. Oxos would be effective in quenching thirst, however, and safer to drink than (most probably polluted) water. The sponge (Gk, spongos; Phylum porifera) is an aquatic, filter-feeding organism, not recognized as an animal until the nineteenth century of our era. The production of ‘bath sponges’ was quite a lucrative industry in the ancient Mediterranean world. It involved dangerous diving, deep into the sea, tearing the sponges off rocks, either by hand or with a hand-held rake or sickle, allowing them to die and dry in the air and then washing them thoroughly. Only about ten of the 5,000–6,000 known species of sponges and another 4,000– 5,000 species estimated to exist worldwide can be used in this way.12 Other uses of the sponge in the ancient world included decorative wall painting, hydrotherapy and suckling babies with honey. Roman soldiers were supplied with sponges ‘to

11. R. E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah (London: Chapman, 1994), p. 146. 12. K. Rützler, ‘Sponge Diving – Professional but not for Profit’, in Methods and Techniques of Underwater Research (Dauphin Island, AL: American Academy of Underwater Sciences, 1996), pp. 183–204 (183–4). Available at: http://collections.si.edu/search/results. htm?q=record_ID:SILSRO_73604 (accessed 10 February 2016).

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stuff their helmets, and for personal hygiene and drinking’.13 This may well be the source of the sponge used in the crucifixion scene.

15. §6 For my clothing they cast lots (Jn 19.24) Jesus, carrying his own cross (Jn 19.17), goes out of the city to Golgotha. The ominous etymology of this place name suggests that this is a skull-shaped outcrop of rock. We note that the Johannine Jesus is not dragged to Golgotha. He ‘goes out’ with the same purposefulness that we saw in the garden (18.4). He does not need assistance to carry the patibulum – the part of the cross that would be fastened to the upright beam that had already been driven into the ground.14 Like Isaac (Gen. 22.6), he carries the wood himself. The narration of the actual crucifixion is sparse: just a short sentence (Jn 19.18) and later a temporal clause (19.23) introducing matters on which the Evangelist is far more interested in dwelling. It is not until the appearance of the risen Lord that we learn incidentally of the marks in Jesus’ hands (20.25, 27) and gather that he was nailed and not tied to the cross. The narrative function of this detail is not to highlight the brutality, but to identify the Risen One as the Jesus the disciples have known. The dividing out of Jesus’ clothes is standard behaviour on the part of soldierexecutioners. It means that Jesus’ last few meagre possessions – his sandals, girdle, tunic and perhaps his himation – are taken from him. There is also the intriguing possibility that he was still wearing the purple himation. We have not been told that it was removed (cf. Mk 15.20; Mt. 27.31). This utter despoliation amounts to treating Jesus as if he were already dead and this happens to be the precise intent of the lines from Psalm 22 that all four Evangelists see fulfilled in this scene: They divide my clothes (LXX: himatia) among themselves And for my clothing (LXX: himatismos) they cast lots. (Ps. 22.18)

In the psalm’s poetry, the synonymous parallelism describes the same experience in two different ways. In drawing on this psalm – obviously a commonly used scriptural testimony in the early Jesus movement – the Fourth Evangelist decides not only what to cite but also what to avoid citing: the cry of forsakenness (Ps. 22.1 cited in Mt. 27.46 and Mk 15.34) and the mocking taunts of the adversaries (Ps 22.7-8 alluded to in Mt. 27.43, Mk 15.29 and Lk. 23.35). This selectivity indicates that the one verse cited must have resonated with Johannine believers’ understanding of the crucifixion as the most complete manifestation of Jesus’ glory. Rather than alluding informally to the psalm verse, as in the synoptics (Mt. 27.35; Mk 15.24; Lk. 23.34), the Evangelist quotes it explicitly and then describes

13. R. Pronzato and R. Manconi, ‘Mediterranean Commercial Sponges: Over 5000 Years of Natural History and Cultural Heritage’, Marine Ecology 29 (2008), pp. 146–66 (146–7). 14. Haenchen, John II, p. 198.

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two separate actions by which it is dramatized in fulfilment of the scripture (Jn 19.23-25). This brings us to the Evangelist’s purpose in highlighting Jesus’ tunic (Gk, chitōn: a garment worn under the himation, a tunic or shirt). The fact that it was neither knitted nor sewn together at the top and sides (like the chitōn found at the Cave of Letters15), but woven without seams makes it a costly garment.16 As for the fibre that was used to make it, we are not told. However, such garments were generally made of wool.17 To understand the tunic’s significance, we need to look at several scriptural robe-tearing incidents. During Solomon’s reign, the prophet Ahija tears his new garment into twelve pieces, giving ten to Jeroboam (1 Kgs 11.29-31). The prophet’s garment stands in for King Solomon’s robe. In the ancient world royal clothing had special significance as a symbol of the king’s status and integrity (Esth. 6.7-9; Ps. 45.8; Isa. 11.5). The torn royal robe is a portent of Solomon’s sovereignty over the land, about to be ‘shredded’ and drastically reduced to two ‘pieces’ – the tribal territories of Judah and Benjamin – when Jeroboam becomes king of a separate Northern Kingdom of Israel (1 Kgs 11.26-12.24). There are echoes here of the story of David cutting a piece off Saul’s cloak in the cave at En-gedi (1 Sam. 24.1-22). This, in turn, recalls an earlier occasion when a royal garment was torn. As Samuel turned to go away, Saul (Heb., ‘he’) caught hold of the hem of his robe, and it tore. And Samuel said to him, ‘The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day, and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.’ (1 Sam. 15.27-28)

The NRSV, quoted here, clarifies the Hebrew, as does the LXX, by changing ‘he’ to ‘Saul’. In the Hebrew text, however, it is not clear whose robe is being torn, Samuel’s or Saul’s. This ambiguity is retained in the Targum. ‘And Samuel turned around to go, and he took hold of the edge of his robe and it was torn.’18 A version of this incident preserved in Midrash Tehillim 57.3 takes full advantage of the ambiguity. Saul asks Samuel to identify this neighbour of his to whom the Lord is about to give the kingship. Samuel gives him a clue. ‘He who rends your robe shall take away your kingship.’19 And, of course, this is exactly what happens in the cave at En-gedi. Obviously traditions found in this late Midrash cannot be guaranteed to pre-date the Fourth Gospel. However, the Johannine incident of

15. Y. Yadin, The Finds from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (Judean Desert Studies; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1963), p. 66. 16. N. Primentas, ‘The Tunic without Seam: Technological and Hermeneutical Approach’, DBM 10 (1991) pp. 38–50. 17. Edwards, ‘Dress and Ornamentation’, p. 236. 18. D. J. Harrington and A. J. Saldarini (trans.), Targum Jonathan of the Former Prophets (The Aramaic Bible 10; Edinburgh: T& T. Clark, 1987), p. 130. 19. W. Braude (trans.), The Midrash on Psalms (Yale Judaica Series. 3 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), I, p. 501.

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Jesus’ untorn robe may well show that the midrashic reading of the story can be dated back to the late first century CE. For our purposes, these biblical stories open up the possibility that the tunic of Jesus that is not torn symbolizes his royal status that remains intact and undiminished, in spite of the utter despoliation that he willingly suffers. Jesus’ garments, laid aside and taken up again (Jn 13.4, 12) have particular symbolic value for the Evangelist (Chapter 13, §2). It is also surely significant that this scene follows immediately upon Pilate’s royal inscription. This royal interpretation of the untorn tunic can also include the idea, proposed by many commentators, that Jesus’ seamless robe is a symbol of unity. The Johannine view of Jesus as lifted up, drawing everything to himself (12.32), gathering into one the scattered children of God (11.51-52), is inspired by the prophetic vision of ‘one shepherd’ (Ezek. 34.23; 37.24) ruling over all Israel, now restored to unity as in the days of David. A reading such as this renders the ‘undersong’ of God’s promise of eternal rule to David audible: I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul (2 Sam. 7.15).20 Here again, the role in the narrative of something from the more-than-human world – most likely, the wool that a shepherd has shorn from a sheep – makes the point.

15. §7 Jesus hands over the Spirit (Jn 19.30) Jesus’ last word, Tetelestai – ‘It is finished’ (Jn 19.30) – marks the completion of his day’s work. He has indeed loved his own in the world eis telos – ‘to the end’ (13.1). There are echoes here of the Creator’s completion of the work of making ‘the heavens and the earth and their multitude’ on the sixth day (Gen. 1.31-2.1; Chapter 1, §5). In Johannine time, in keeping with the Jewish reckoning where days begin on the previous evening, it is now the Sabbath. The Evangelist mentions that this particular Sabbath is ‘a great day’ (Jn 19.31; NRSV: ‘a day of great solemnity’). At surface level this is because Passover falls on a Sabbath that year. At a deeper level, Jesus’ death ushers in the new aeon that was envisaged as an eternal Sabbath (Chapter 7, §5). Jesus bows his head and breathes out his life, or in a more literal translation, gives up the spirit (Jn 19.30). The polyvalence of the Greek word pneuma, used here, allows for various shades of meaning: the breath of life, the wind, a person’s inner being or spirit, the divine Spirit. The bowing of his head means that Jesus breathes the pneuma onto the women and the beloved disciple who stand near the cross (19.25). This enables an audience of re-readers to understand that what is happening here is the same reality as that described at a subsequent point on the gospel’s spiral path: the moment when the risen Jesus’ breathes on the disciples saying, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ (20.22). Now that Jesus is glorified – already, even here on the cross – the Spirit is given (7.39). From our Earth-conscious perspective, however, we might also envisage Jesus inclining his head towards the ground so

20. For more detail, see Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 208–19.

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that he breathes the ‘breath of life’ onto the Earth. As will become clearer in the progress of the narrative, the bestowal of Jesus’ breath/spirit will bring about a renewal of the whole creation. The recurrence of the spirit-breathing motif in the scene set behind locked doors (Jn 20.19) will draw out more fully the implications of the ‘wind’, now released into the world to blow where it chooses (3.8). The risen Jesus breathing on his disciples (20.22) is reminiscent of the Creator breathing life into the clay figure of a human being (Gen. 2.7), the breath re-creating the dry bones of Israel (Ezek. 37.9-10), and the outbreathed divine spirit restoring to life creatures that have turned to dust, re-creating them and renewing the face of the earth (Ps. 104.29-30). When discussing the role of Wisdom in the gospel’s prologue (Chapter 2, §1), we looked at a psalmist’s account of the creation of the kosmos where the poetic parallelism suggests a kind of correspondence between the divine word and the divine breath on which the word is, as it were, carried. By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath (Gk, pneuma: spirit) of his mouth. (Ps. 33.6)

It was as Word made flesh that divine Wisdom came and lived among us earthlings (Jn 1.14). It is as Spirit that she remains with the creation forever (14.16). ‘Peace be with you,’ is Jesus’ greeting, repeated as he commissions the disciples and breathes the Spirit into them (20.19, 21). This peace signals the arrival of the age to come (Chapter 13, §9), the return of the kosmos to the way it was when God’s work was completed (Gen. 2.2). It fulfils the vision of renewal for the whole Earth celebrated at every Passover (Chapter 3, §7). The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world (Jn 1.29). The disciples, having inhaled the Holy Spirit, are to breathe that Spirit out in the world for the forgiveness of sins (20.22-23) that will happen as those receptive to their message transform their way of living on the Earth, inspired by Jesus’ example. Thus the life breath that the dying Jesus gives up is ‘God’s life breathing all things alive, gathering humankind into the fresh peacefulness, finished fruitfulness, of God’s creation’.21

15. §8 What must we do to perform the works of God? (Jn 6.28) The dying Jesus shares in the condition of ‘everything that breathes’ (Ps. 150.6): eventually being no longer able to inhale ‘the breath of life’ (Gen. 2.7). We must protect the gift of air – the fragile troposphere that extends only about twelve kilometres above the Earth. When we breathe we share in the life of all living creatures that surround us with their own breath. To deprive an organism of its breath is to extinguish its life. To alter the composition of what an organism breathes is to threaten its life and we are doing just that all over the world through

21. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 94.

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our pollution of the air. A documentary called Under the Dome, made in 2014 by the Chinese journalist Chai Jing, highlighted the predicament of people living in cities where the air quality is so poor that children have never seen the stars or a white cloud. It is poignant that Jing’s metaphor for urban smog – a dome – is similar to the ancient Hebrew idea of the firmament, designed to provide a safe place for life to flourish. Believers in Jesus are pledged to work for the integrity of Earth’s atmosphere and the purity of the air, through politics, ecology, technology and, above all, by themselves implementing and modelling a change of societal values.22 Listening in Earth-conscious mode to the account of how Jesus laid down his life, we might recall that in the Johannine strand of the early movement Jesus was venerated as a martyr: ‘the faithful witness’ (Gk, martus: witness; Rev. 1.5) who, because of his testimony to the truth (Jn 18.37), was ‘hated without a cause’ (15.25), persecuted (15.20), arrested, convicted on a trumped-up charge and executed. This may prompt us to think of people whose advocacy or protest in response to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor has led them along some of this path, and even all the way to their death. These are martyrs for ecology who put their lives at risk (Chapter 10, §4) and have even given them ‘for the life of the world’ (6.51): people shot dead for their efforts to defend indigenous communities who have lived simple, ecologically sustainable lives for generations from the depredations of massive transnational agribusiness interests; people murdered because they tried to protect what is left of a rainforest, people who exposed illegal and predatory exploitation of Earth’s resources and were ‘mysteriously’ eliminated.23 Often their deaths have not been properly investigated and Christian leaders who speak out against such atrocities have received death threats themselves. There can be no greater love than ‘to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (Jn 15.13). Looking at this saying in the context of our world today we may well see something we did not notice before: that our more-than-human Earth-kin are our friends and that our love for them must be so great that we are prepared to give of ourselves, even to put our lives on the line, for their flourishing (Chapter 10, §6). Disciples of Jesus are, by definition, friends of the Earth.

22. T. Hiebert, ‘Air, the First Sacred Thing: The Conception of Ruah in the Hebrew Scriptures’, in Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics (ed. N. C. Habel and P. Trudinger; Atlanta: Society of Biblical literature, 2008), pp. 9–19. 23. J. Wilkins, ‘Ecology’s Martyrs’, in The Tablet, 7 January 1989, p. 11.

Chapter 16 I H AVE C OME TO M Y G ARDEN (SONG 5.1)

We saw at the outset of this Earth-conscious reading of the gospel that it is more like variations on the theme of ‘the hour’ than a linear composition telling a story (Introduction, §6). This means that, to cite Stephen D. Moore, ‘The Johannine Jesus is, from his very first appearance in the Gospel, a Jesus risen from the dead even before he has died, a Jesus always resurrected.’1 It also means that the Johannine post-resurrection appearances do not have the same function as those in the synoptics. As Sandra M. Schneiders points out, the primary purpose of John 20 is ‘not to tell the reader what happened after Jesus’ death but to explore … the effect on and meaning for the believers of Jesus’ glorification’.2 To contemplate the body of Jesus – pierced, embalmed, wrapped in linen and laid to rest – is to reflect on that glorification, no less than when considering Mary’s encounter with the Risen One in the garden.

16. §1 A sudden flow of water (Jn 19.34) Instead of breaking Jesus’ legs, one of the soldiers pierces his side with a spear and at once blood and water come out (Jn 19.34). At the level of ‘earthly things’ (Gk, ta epigeia; 3.12) the soldier is verifying Jesus’ death.3 The Evangelist interrupts the narrative to assure the audience that this is reliable eyewitness testimony intended to elicit faith (19.35). The NRSV puts this assertion in brackets. An earlier generation of commentators saw it as a redactional anti-docetic interpolation.4

1. S. D. Moore, ‘Some Ugly Thoughts on the Fourth Gospel at the Threshold of the Third Millennium’, in ‘What is John?’ Volume II: Literary and Social Readings of the Fourth Gospel (ed. F. F. Segovia; SBL Symposium Series 7; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), pp. 239– 47 (240). 2. Schneiders, ‘John 20:11-18: The Encounter of the Easter Jesus with Mary Magdalene – A Transformative Feminist Reading’, in ‘What is John?’: Readers and Readings of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 155–82 (156). 3. Brown, The Gospel according to John, I, p. 935. 4. Lindars, The Gospel, p. 589.

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Over the centuries, numerous medical theories were proposed to explain how the flow of blood and water proved that Jesus had genuinely died.5 Various symbolic interpretations of the blood and water were offered, the most cogent, perhaps, being the flushing away with water of the blood from the sacrifices onto the sloped stone floor around the altar from which it then flowed out of the temple (Let. Arist. 88-90). However, there is far more at issue here than physical evidence to validate the ‘miracle’ of Jesus’ resurrection. The manuscript transmission of Jn 19.34 – ‘and at once blood and water came out’ – is confused. The word order ‘water and blood’ is found in P66 (ca 200 CE), in several patristic readings and in a ‘Johannine’ addition to Mt. 27.49 found in two fourth-century manuscripts. The singular verb (exelthen) is not grammatically incorrect for two liquids coming out in a single flow, but it does allow for the prospect that an earlier form of the gospel did not mention blood. Cyprian, an important third-century witness to the text, says that water (only) flowed from Jesus’ side (Ep. 63.8). Since, as we have seen (Chapter 6, §5), he was arguing in favour of the mixed eucharistic cup of water and wine, he would surely have mentioned the blood if it was in his Latin version of Jn 19.34. It is plausible that ‘and blood’ was added to the gospel, under a similar liturgical impulse to that which occasioned the redactional addition of Jn 6.51c–58, when eucharistic water drinking was being supplanted by the drinking of the mixed cup of water and wine (Chapter 8, §9). By this time, the copyists’ liturgical experience would have convinced them that ‘water’ (only) was an error in need of correction. Disagreement about this matter may also explain the enigmatic ‘not with the water only but with the water and the blood’ in another Johannine passage, 1 Jn 5.6. There is also the momentum of the gospel as a whole. As Culpepper notes, the significance of water in the Fourth Gospel seems to expand as the narrative unfolds.6 It builds via Jn 4.7-15 and 7.38, reaching a climax when the soldier pierces the dead Jesus’ side. The intensive nature of the verb in Jn 19.34 (Gk, exerchomai, come out, burst out) suggests that it is the suddenness and the profusion of the flow that the Evangelist finds extraordinary. Jesus’ death is his giving of the Spirit, for which the biblical tradition regularly employs water imagery (Chapter 5, §4). There would therefore be a far greater narrative logic in ‘a sudden flow’ (NIV) of abundant water gushing out in immeasurable profusion (Jn 3.34) from the side of the temple of Jesus’ body (2.21). After all, it happened, the Evangelist tells us, ‘so that the Scripture might be fulfilled’ (19.36). This was well understood by the anonymous composer of the Vidi Aquam, a traditional Easter antiphon, adapted from Ezek. 47.1. ‘I saw water coming out of the temple, from the right side, alleluia, and all to whom the water came were saved and sing alleluia.’

5. Haenchen, John, II, p. 197. 6. Culpepper, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, pp.192–5.

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16. §2 A fountain opened for the house of David (Zech. 13.1) As we saw when thinking about how the gospel’s audience might have imagined Eden (Chapter 1, §2), abundantly flowing water is an essential feature of actual and imagined royal gardens. Given the climate of Israel, a garden (LXX, paradeisos) has to be ‘watered’ (Isa. 58.11); a garden without water is an image of desolation (1.30). Josephus mentions the flowing streams in Solomon’s paradeisos at Etan (Ant. 8.186) and the spring in David’s paradeisos near Jerusalem (Ant. 7.347). In the arid conditions of the ancient Near East, water had to be husbanded carefully. The water brought from great distances to paradise gardens by aqueducts would not have been left flowing indefinitely. The channels would have been opened only for necessary irrigation, ideally when the king was about to promenade in the garden, typically ‘at the time of the evening breeze’ (Gen. 3.8). We read of a sealed garden fountain in Song 4.12 and of a fountain being opened for the house of David in Zech. 13.1. When the dams were released and the waterworks allowed to play, the trees and plants would have quickly begun to show the benefit of the water. Their fragrance would have become more pronounced as it lingered in the moistened air. The delight of such an experience comes through in a passage from the English travel writer Henry Swinburne (1743–1803) describing a visit to an elaborate walled garden in Spain. Even if a little quaint for our taste today, it has much to teach us about the effect on a garden of a sudden, copious flow of water. A large party of sprightly damsels and young men that were walking here were much indebted to us for making the waterworks play, by means of a small bribe to the keeper. Nothing can be more delicious than these sprinklings on a hot day: all the flowers seemed to acquire new vigour; the odours exhaled from the orange, citron, and lemon trees grew more poignant, more balsamic, and the company ten times more alive than they were; it was a true April shower.7

The ‘rivers of living water’ (Jn 7.38) cascading down the skull-shaped outcrop of rock on which Jesus is crucified (19.17) are a re-actualization of the water flowing from the Exodus rock – assimilated to the temple rock in Jewish symbolism (Chapter 6, §4; Chapter 9, §3). This signifies the arrival of ‘that day’, foretold by Zechariah, when living waters will flow out from the temple to bring life to the whole Earth, continuing in summer as in winter. This is the day when God becomes king over all the Earth (Zech. 14.8-9). The water that Ezekiel saw flowing from the temple brought new life wherever it flowed, making all earth’s rivers fresh and full of teeming fish (perhaps evoked in Jn 21.11), irrigating the land so that all kinds of beautiful trees might flourish and produce fruit for food and leaves for healing (Ezek. 47.3-12; see Rev. 22.1-2). As the Latin inscription on the fifthcentury baptismal pool in Rome’s Lateran Basilica reads, ‘This is the spring of life

7. H. Swinburne, Travels Through Spain, in the Years 1775 and 1776 (London: P. Elmsly, 1779), p. 17; cited by Tyas in Flowers of the Holy Land, pp. 177–8.

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which flowed from its source in Christ’s wounded side into the whole world.’ The Evangelist has already explained that when Jesus promised these ‘rivers of living water’ he was speaking about Holy Spirit (7.38-39). So this scene points to the same reality as the two scenes where Jesus breathes out the Spirit (19.30; 20.22). And here too, like the world’s forgiveness breathed out by the risen Jesus (20.22-23; Chapter 15, §7) amounting to a rebirth for the whole creation (Chapter 14, §5), the waters of the opened fountain are for cleansing from sin (Zech. 13.1).8

16. §3 A mixture of myrrh and aloes (Jn 19.39) Unique to the Johannine account of what happened after Jesus died is the arrival of Nicodemus ‘who had first come to Jesus by night’ (Jn 19.39). This little flashback hints that Nicodemus would have thought of ‘the serpent lifted up in the wilderness’ (3.14) when he saw Jesus’ body on the cross. Nicodemus comes ‘bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds’. That he ‘brought’ (not ‘bought’) the spices is one of the secrets about women that lie hidden in the text of the gospel. We last heard of aromatic spices measured by weight when Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus with her pistikē – finest-quality myrrh. In that scene Jesus senses her awareness of what lay before him and knows that she has bought the costly perfume ‘so that she might keep it for the day of [his] burial’ (12.1-8; Chapter  11, §7). The participle ‘bringing’ in Jn 19.39 implies that Nicodemus’ lavish quantity of spices includes the pistikē from the household of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, the friends whom Jesus loves and with whom he sits at table on the first day of the week.9 Since his first meeting with Jesus (3.1), Nicodemus has become part of that circle. He may even have learnt to wash the feet (13.1415) of people that formerly he would have been more likely to despise (7.49). Up until now he seems to have been discreet about his membership, like Joseph of Arimathea (19.38), having found that defending Jesus, even obliquely, does not go down well with his peers among the Jewish authorities (7.50-52). Nicodemus brings a phenomenal amount of myrrh and aloes to honour the body of Jesus – 100 pounds in weight. The pounds would be either the Roman pound, about 326.4 g., or the mina, about 340 g. (Chapter 11, §7). He and Joseph enfold the body in linen saturated with these aromatic products. The Evangelist’s contemporaries would immediately recognize this as a royal burial. In the ancient world, ownership of vast quantities of these luxury items was the prerogative of kings. In fact, spices and fragrant oils were as important a part of a royal treasury as gold and silver (2 Kgs 20.13). The honour due to the body of a king included laying it on a bier ‘filled with various kinds of spices prepared by the perfumer’s art’ (2 Chron. 16.14). Josephus records, for example, that five hundred servants carried the burial spices when Herod the Great died (Ant. 17.198-199).

8. For more detail, see Daly-Denton, David in the Fourth Gospel, pp. 219–29. 9. Esler and Piper, Lazarus, Mary & Martha, p. 73.

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Nicodemus’ spices contain a mixture of myrrh (Chapter 11, §7) and aloes (Gk, aloē). It has been suggested that the aloe here is probably Aloe succotrina – a small plant that grew in Israel with succulent leaves from which an aromatic juice was extracted to be used for embalming and in incense and scented powder – rather than the resin of the more exotic Aquilaria agallocha, Eaglewood; Heb., ‘ahal).10 In the Hebrew Bible, ‘ahal perfumes royal garments (Ps. 45.8; see also Song 4.14) and beds (Prov. 7.17). In Num. 24.6, a vision of a garden-like Israel, ‘ahal flourishes in riverside groves along with palm trees and cedars. Native to North India, the eaglewood-aloe grows to a height of over 100 metres, with a trunk up to three metres in circumference.11 The Septuagint lacks a consistent translation of ‘ahal that might help in determining which of the two aloes Nicodemus brought. The suggestion that it was the more common, and thus less expensive, aloe is probably prompted by the vast quantity that he brought. Such literalism misses the point of the intentional hyperbole in this scene. The aloes must at least match the high quality of Mary’s pistikē smyrna. Nicodemus’ arōmata (Gk, arōma: a sweet smelling oil or salve; NRSV spice) ‘stand in’ for the aromaticity of all the prized fragrances mentioned in the Scriptures: pervading the temple, emanating from the bridegroom-king, originating in Eden and representing the wonderful diversity and beauty of Earth’s flora. Many of the aromatic spices and perfumes used in ancient Israel came from trees and shrubs growing in distant countries, some as far away as India, Sri Lanka and China. The ingredients of the holy anointing oil all came from trees: myrrh from resin, cinnamon and cassia from bark. With the exception of onycha – derived from a Red Sea mollusc – the spices blended to make the temple incense – stacte, galbanum and frankincense – were all plant based (Exod. 30.22-38). So in this scene, Nicodemus ensures that the ‘temple’ that is Jesus’ body (Jn 2.21) exudes the fragrances of Eden’s trees (Chapter 1, §4) and not the stench of death (11.39). From Josephus we learn that the temple incense, compounded with ‘thirteen fragrant spices from sea and from land, both uninhabited and inhabited  … signified that all things are of God and for God’ (J.W. 5.218). ‘Lifted up’, Jesus draws all things to himself (Jn 12.32): all people and all of the more-than-human world (Chapter 12, §4–§5). Finally, it is sometimes suggested that Nicodemus’ action betrays his misunderstanding of Jesus. This would perhaps be the case if this scene were a funeral for the dead Jesus, but that would be far from the Johannine concept of ‘the hour’ that encompasses Jesus’ death, resurrection, ascension and the giving of the Spirit. Yet again, the role of the more-than-human in the narrative makes the point. ‘The powerful and invigorating aroma’ of Nicodemus’ spices ‘points forward to the Easter garden (kēpos; Jn 18.1, 26; 19.41), the fragrance of spring and newblossoming flowers and herbs’,12 thereby enabling the audience to see that Jesus’ death is his glorification.

10. Jacob and Jacob, ‘Flora’, pp. 804–5. 11. Ibid., p. 812. 12. Lee, ‘The Gospel of John and the Five Senses’, p. 125.

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16. §4 In Linen Cloths (Jn 19.40) The more-than-human speaks again in the linen enfolding the body of Jesus (Jn 19.40) and then left behind in the tomb (20.5-8). Joseph and Nicodemus wrap (Gk, deomai, bind) the fabric around the body, according to Jewish burial customs, also followed in the case of Lazarus who had to be unbound when he came out from his tomb (11.44). However, while Lazarus is bound in strips of an unspecified fabric (Gk, keiria: a band or strip of cloth), Jesus is bound in linen (Gk, othonion: a piece or strip of linen cloth). As a quality textile, linen speaks of the honour given to a king. Fine linen (Gk, bussos and bussinon), a high-value luxury, is mentioned in the same breath as pearls and purple cloth in Rev. 18.12. The Evangelist’s word, othonion, does not give any indication of the quality, but somehow we expect of Nicodemus that he would have used the finest linen he could find. Flax for making linen (Linum usitasissimum) was grown extensively  in ancient Egypt (Exod. 9.31; Isa. 19.9-10) and a reference to ‘the month of pulling flax’ in the Gezer calendar shows that it has been grown in Israel at least from the time of Solomon (see also Josh. 2.6; Prov. 31.13). It was used to make cords (Ezek. 40.3), wicks (Isa. 42.3), sails (Ezek. 27.7), curtains and fabrics of varying quality for clothing. In heavenly visions, angels and heavenly beings are often dressed in linen (Ezek. 10.2; Rev. 15.6; 19.14) and the wearing of linen is strongly associated with Israel’s priesthood (Exod. 28.6; Ezek. 44.17-18). Thus the Chronicler’s reference to David being clothed with a robe of fine linen (1 Chr. 15.27) refers to the king’s cultic role. In his explanation of the temple curtain woven from linen, purple, blue and scarlet, representing earth, sea, air and fire, Josephus refers to fine linen as a symbol of the earth since flax grows up from it (Ant. 3.183). Whether or not the Evangelist had this in mind, we will never know, but it is an appealing idea for Earth-conscious readers of the gospel, as is another idea from Philo, no doubt inspired by linen’s capacity to outlast other textiles. Linen is not like wool, the product of creatures subject to death (Spec. Laws. 1.84). It is the product of plants that are continually being renewed and keep growing forever.

16. §5 There was a garden in the place where he was crucified (Jn 19.41) The garden (Gk. kēpos) where Jesus is given a royal burial in a new tomb with a stone securing its entrance (Jn 20.1) is the king’s garden (Chapter 1, §3) in the Kidron valley (2 Kgs 25.4; Jer. 52.7). The Hebrew of Neh. 3.15-16 mentions the graves of David – evidently the graves of the Davidic dynasty – in a garden just outside Jerusalem, reached by steps going down from the city wall. The Septuagint of this verse refers to the grave (singular) of David in the king’s kēpos. King David’s tomb is also mentioned by Luke (Acts 2.29) and Josephus (J.W. 1.61). The scriptures tell of two Davidic kings being buried in ‘the king’s garden’ (LXX: kēpos): Manasseh (2 Kgs 21.18) and Amon (21.26). Interestingly, when recording Manasseh’s burial,

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Josephus makes a point of highlighting the prestige of the Davidic dynasty by calling the royal garden the king’s paradeisos (Ant. 10.46). The Evangelist is insistent about the garden location of Jesus’ tomb, mentioning it twice in one sentence (Jn 19.41). Obviously the garden burial befits the royal Davidic Messiah (Chapter 1, §3).13 However, from what we know of the Evangelist’s penchant for multilayered symbolism, there is likely to be far more to the garden than this.14 The audience’s instinctive reaction would surely be to ‘search the Scriptures’ (5.39) in order to understand the significance of this garden. It would surely have evoked images of Eden, ‘filtered’ through the interpretive traditions outlined in Chapter 1 of this book: a paradeisos planted by God who appointed the human being (Gk, ho anthrōpos) to work there as the royal gardener; a place of fragrant and fruitful trees, watered by flowing streams; the first area of dry land separated from the abyss; the place where all Earth’s flora and fauna, including humankind, were created; the site where the temple would eventually be built, modelled on the design of the creation; the navel of the Earth from which streams of life-giving water would flow out. The various catastrophes that beset Israel over the centuries – exile, dispersal, conquest, colonialization – were an experience of  banishment from this ‘Eden’. Israel’s restoration would mean readmission to the garden.

16. §6 The tree of life (Gen. 3.24) The opening up of ‘the way to the tree of life’, barred at the time of the expulsion (Gen. 3.24), is a common motif in writings that anticipate an eschatological readmission of humankind to the garden. As we have suggested, this may be part of the scriptural ‘mix’ in Jesus’ statement, ‘I am the way’ (Jn 14.6; Chapter 13, §7). Even though there were two significant trees in Eden (Gen. 2.9), it is the tree of life that exercises the imagination of Jewish writers who think of the restoration as a return to Eden. In Johannine circles the ‘great many trees’ bearing fresh fruit every month that Ezekiel saw on the bank of the enormous river flowing from the temple (Ezek. 47.7, 12) are merged into one ‘tree of life’ (Rev. 22.2) that somehow manages to grow on both sides of the river of life. A passage in

13. J. Schaper, ‘The Messiah in the Garden: John 19.38-41, (Royal) Gardens, and Messianic Concepts’, in Paradise in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Views (ed. M. Bockmuehl and G. G. Strousma; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 17–27. 14. R. Zimmerman, ‘Imagery in John: Opening up Paths into the Tangled Thicket of John’s Figurative World’, in Imagery in the Gospel of John: Terms, Forms, Themes, and Theology of Johannine Figurative Language (ed. J. Frey and G. Kern; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), pp. 1–43 (22); R. Zimmerman, ‘Symbolic Communication between John and His Reader: The Garden Symbolism in John 19-20’, in Anatomies of Narrative Criticism: The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature (ed. T. Thatcher and S. D. Moore; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008).

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1 Enoch that could well be roughly contemporary with the Evangelist describes the tree of life, its aromatic fragrance unlike anything he has ever smelt and its fruit clusters unbelievably beautiful. When Enoch asks Michael, the interpreting angel, about the tree, he is warned that no human being is allowed near it until the final judgement, when access to the tree will be granted to the elect (1 Enoch 24-25). In Revelation, the exalted Jesus declares, ‘To everyone who conquers, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God’ (Rev. 2.7). The Evangelist’s subtle intimation that the place where Jesus was crucified was at least beside a garden, if not actually in one, leaves open the possibility that the cross is the tree of life. Two different words are used for ‘tree’ in the Greek Scriptures: dendron and xulon. Both are used for a living tree (e.g. Ezek. 47; Neh. 9.25; Ps. 1.3), but xulon tends to be preferred for dead wood or timber (e.g. Deut. 19.5; Lev. 14.4). Thus xulon is used for the tree/gallows on which someone has been hanged (Deut. 21.23; Est. 5.14; 7.9). The law stating that the body ‘shall not remain all night upon the tree’ (LXX, xulon; Deut. 21.23) – is observed in the case of Jesus (Jn 19.31). Paul calls the cross of Jesus’ crucifixion a xulon (Gal. 3.13, citing Deut. 21.23)). An early Christian psalm gloss reads, ‘Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns from the tree”’ (Gk, xulon; Ps. 96.10 [LXX 95.10)] as cited by Justin, Dial. 71). The fact that xulon is used consistently in Genesis for the trees of Eden, including the tree of life (Gen. 2.9; see also Rev. 2.7, 22.2) may lend support to the suggestion of a Johannine identification of Jesus’ cross as the tree of life. Perhaps, though, the most convincing argument is the whole Johannine concept of ‘eternal life’ that, as John Ashton notes, ‘almost always carries some of the extra resonance already discernible in the symbol of the tree of life’.15 The Word/Wisdom made flesh in Jesus (Jn 1.14) is, after all, ‘a tree of life’ (Prov. 3.18) and immortality is promised to those who follow her way (Wis. 6.18; 8:13, 17).

16. §7 Early on the first day of the week (Jn 20.1) The echoes of Eden persist as Mary stoops to look into the tomb and sees two angels. Have these heavenly beings replaced the (two) cherubim who barred the way to the tree of life? Gen. 3.24 does not actually say that there were two of them, but since Eden is the temple, obviously there would have been (Exod. 25.18). Just as these two liminal beings marked the holy of holies, the two angels, robed in white, reverence the resting place of the temple of Jesus’ body (Jn 2.21). Mary’s need to stoop in order to see suggests that the body of Jesus has been lying below ground level, in the Earth. This final scene to be explored in our Earth-conscious reading occurs ‘early’ – as light begins to dawn. Like the scene occurring exactly a week beforehand – ‘six

15. Ashton, ‘Riddles and Mysteries’, p. 342.

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days before the Passover’ – when Jesus was at table with his friends in Bethany and Mary anointed him with her pistikē (Jn 12.1-8; Chapter 11 §7), this scene occurs ‘on the first day of the week’ (20.1). Known to a Greco-Roman audience as ‘the day of the sun’, this was the day of the regular weekly assembly when believers in Jesus gathered to express their membership of the community of ‘his own’ (13.1). Having washed one another’s feet, they reclined at table to share generously whatever food and drink they had, to repeat their stories about Jesus and to listen in Spirit-guided attentiveness (14.26) to the Scriptures that they believed bore witness to him (5.39). The enjoyment of Earth’s sustaining gifts each ‘first day of the week’ (20.19, 26) was an experience of Jesus giving them ‘the bread of life’ (6.35) and the ‘water springing up to eternal life’ (4.14). As the account of ‘the hour’ continues, the Evangelist does not let the audience forget that this part of the narrative, where ‘the hour’ is viewed from the perspective of Jesus’ resurrection, all takes place on ‘the first day of the week’. ‘Eight days later’ (Jn 20.26 RSV), counting according to the Jewish system, is the following Sunday, even if the NRSV misses the point with its translation, ‘a week later’. The first day of the seven-day week recalls ‘the first day’ of the work of creation when God said, ‘Let there be light’ (Gen. 1.3-4). Ever since, the creation has functioned in sevenday weeks that make up the lunar months and the annual seasonal rhythms of unfolding time that were celebrated in the great temple festivals. The new creation, signalled by Jesus’ outbreathing of the Holy Spirit (Jn 19.30; 20.22), is a new ‘first day’ of a new creation. We know from several early Christian sources that the Jesus movement had absorbed from its parent Judaism the idea that the eighth day symbolized the aeon to come, ‘the beginning of a time not reckoned and unending, neither years, nor months, nor weeks nor days, nor hours’ (2 Enoch 33.1-2; Barn. 15.8-9; Justin, Dial. 41.4; 138.1). The phrase ‘eight days later’ would suggest that Johannine believers, with their distinctive understanding of ‘eternal life’, believed that, even as they went about their daily lives in the normal weekly round, they were living in ‘the eighth day’ – the new aeon beyond earthly time, the resurrection. When discussing the Cana wedding (Jn 2.1-11), we noted the suggestion that ‘the third day’ (2.1), following five previous days, may actually be the eighth day. That would mean that ‘the eighth day’ when the disciples are again assembled, when Thomas makes his profession of faith in the God revealed in Jesus and when Jesus declares, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’ (20.26-29), forms an inclusion with the first ‘sign’, the Cana wedding. For the audience, this would link the disciples’ joy when they see the Lord (20.20) with the joy of John’s recognition of Jesus as ‘the bridegroom’ (3.29). To see the risen Jesus and to hear his voice is to experience the arrival of the aeon, best described in the Scriptures as the land, or the Earth, having its wedding. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. (Isa 62.5)

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16. §8 For now the winter is past (Song 2.11) This brings us to the Johannine scene where a man and a woman embrace in a garden. This study has given much attention to the Garden of Eden, but, as Clare Amos points out in her essay about Mary’s encounter with ‘the gardener’, there is another important biblical garden. For the two lovers of the Song of Songs tryst with each other in a verdant garden strangely redolent of Eden, but which is now a timeless paradise where love reigns supreme … where mortality is held in check by love, for love, as the song itself tells us, is as strong as death.16

There is an unmistakable ‘Song of Songs’ atmosphere about this scene set in the garden where the shepherd-king reclined on his perfumed bed (Jn 19.40-42; Song 1.12-13). The whole garden is fragrant, not only with its own trees, but with Nicodemus’ extraordinary quantity of ‘myrrh and aloes’ (Jn 19.39; Song 4.16), recalling the arōmata for which a royal paradeisos was celebrated (Chapter 1, §2; see also Song 2.13; 3.6; 4.6). Mary seeks her Beloved and, when she finds him, holds onto him, not wanting to let him go (Jn 20.17; Song 3.1-4). Jesus reminds her that this is the hour of his ascent to the Father. If he does not go, the Advocate, the Spirit, will not come (Jn 16.7) to be the means by which her Beloved will remain with her forever (14.16). This, of course, is all happening at the springtime renewal of the Earth celebrated at Passover. For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. (Song 2.11-13)

The cold (Jn 18.18) has given way to warmth. The garden is unlocked, its fountains unsealed (Jn 19.34; Song 4.12-15). Now we understand why, when the Evangelist wrote of the ‘rivers of living water’ promised to believers (Jn 7.38), the language of the Song of Songs came to mind – ‘a garden fountain, a well of living water’ (Song 4.14). The wind of the Spirit blows through the garden, wafting its fragrances abroad (Jn 19.30; 20.22; Song 4.16). And this is because love is not only as strong as death (8.6), but even stronger. Jesus has been ‘cherished with

16. C. Amos, ‘Love’s Labour Unlost: Women and the Word’, The Way (Supplement) 72 (1991), pp. 48–59 (51). See also Schneiders, ‘John 20:11-18’, pp. 161–2, 166.

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a love that transcends destruction in mortality’.17 Mary thinks that she is seeing the gardener (Gk, kēpouros, one who takes care of a garden, Gk, kēpos: garden or orchard). The garden – a transformation of the Earth – is a symbol of the Creator’s desire for the flourishing of the creation. In or near this garden was ‘the place of the skull’, a place of decay. Now there is a place of new beginning and growth.18 The royal gardener ensures the flourishing of the land (Ps 72.16). Once desolate, it has become ‘like the garden of Eden’ (hōs kēpos tryphēs; Ezek. 36.35 RSV). All things (Gk, panta) that Jesus, lifted up, has drawn to himself (Jn 12.32) are enlivened. The beloved woman in the Song of Songs is drawn to her lover by the alluring fragrance (Gk, ozmē) of his anointing oils (Gk. muron; Song 1.3). If, as seems likely, Jesus’ drawing of all things to himself is an evocation of this biblical epithalamium, then Jn 12.32 is yet another of those Johannine ‘hints’ that Jesus is the Bridegroom (Chapter 3, §4). Even though, as the Evangelist makes a point of explaining (12.33), being ‘lifted up’ means being killed, at Jesus’ ‘hour’ the fragrance in the air is no repellent ozmē of death (11.39), but rather the delightful aroma of Mary’s pistikē (12.3), enhanced a hundred times over (19.39). To quote the poem ‘An Ode after Easter’ by Francis Thompson (1859-1907): Reintegrated are the heavens and earth! from sky to sod The world’s unfolded blossom smells of God.19

16. §9 See, I am making all things new (Rev. 21.5) The gospel begins with creation (Jn 1.3) and ends with creation’s renewal, having, as this Earth-conscious reading has suggested, developed this theme extensively all the way through the narrative. Like the first Exodus, the passing of Jesus ‘from this world to the Father’ (13.1) meant that ‘the whole creation in its nature was fashioned anew’ (Wis. 19.6). The gospel’s ending, however, is open-ended because the divine creational work is to continue through the mission of the disciples.20 This vision of Jesus as the agent of creation’s renewal – clearly shared by the group ‘behind’ the Book of Revelation (Rev. 21.1-2, 5) – energized Johannine believers for their mission.

17. Lash, Believing Three Ways, p. 45. 18. Brodie, The Gospel According to John, p. 559. 19. B. Boardman (ed.), The Poems of Francis Thompson (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 120. 20. J. A. Du Rand, ‘The Creation Motif in the Fourth Gospel: Perspectives on its Narratological Function with a Judaistic Background’, in Theology and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (ed. G. van Belle, J. G. van der Watt and P. Maritz; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), pp. 21–46.

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The Fourth Evangelist and the circle of women and men whose insights shaped the gospel were disciples breathed on and sent by Jesus.21 They reinterpreted his story for their time and their context with the help of the Paraclete that Jesus had promised would teach them everything, and remind them of all that he had said to them (Jn 14.26). The Spirit given ‘without measure’ (3.34) is with today’s disciples as they seek to hear Jesus’ story in a way that might inspire them to pledge themselves to checking – and even, it is to be hoped, reversing – the present deterioration of their common home, the degrading of the Earth from garden to wilderness. As we face into ‘The Great Work’ that the ecological crisis calls for, we recall again Thomas Berry’s encouraging words: ‘We must believe, that those powers that assign our role must in that same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfil this role. We must believe that we are cared for and guided by the same powers that brought us into being.’22 Jesus came to do ‘the work of God’ – the ongoing, sustaining work of salvation and re-creation. ‘The work of renewal is carried on by Jesus the Lord, the Logos incarnate, by means of those who share in his life through their faith in him as he continues to tend his garden, the world.’23 For a gardener, especially one whose winter habitat is dark and cold, the first signs of spring are an irresistible invitation to start work on making the garden into a paradise once more. We believers in Jesus are living in the springtime of the resurrection. As never before in history, common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning.  … Let ours be a time remembered for the wakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.24

21. Haenchen, John, II, p. 216. 22. Berry, The Great Work, p. 7. 23. J. N. Suggit, ‘Jesus the Gardener: The Atonement in the Fourth Gospel as Re-creation’, Neot 33 (1999), pp. 161–8 (163). 24. Earth Charter, The Hague. 29 June 2000, cited in Laudato Si’, par 207.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allchin, A. M., The World is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Andrews, E. D., and F. Andrews, Fruits of the Shaker Tree of Life: Memoirs of Fifty Years of Collecting and Research (Stockbridge, MA: The Berkshire Traveller Press, 1975). Ashton, J., Studying John: Approaches to the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Ashton, J., Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Aune, D., T. Seland and J. H. Ulrichsen (eds), Neotestamentica et Philonica: Studies in Honor of Peder Borgen (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Barker, M., Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010). Barker, M., The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem (London: SPCK, 1991). Barker, M., King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John’s Gospel (London: SPCK, 2014). Barrett, C. K., A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (2nd edn; London: A. & C. Black, 1971). Bauckham, R., and C. Mosser (eds), The Gospel of John and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). Berry, T., The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999). Berry, W., Re-Collected Essays, 1956-1980 (San Francisco: NorthPoint, 1981). Boardman, B. (ed.), The Poems of Francis Thompson (London: Continuum, 2001). Bockmuehl, M., and G. G. Strousma (eds), Paradise in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Views (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Boff, L., Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (New York: Orbis, 1997). Boureaux, C., Dieu est aussi jardinier: La Création, une écologie accomplie (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2014). Boureaux, C., Les plantes de la Bible et leur symbolique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2001). Bradshaw, P. F. (ed.), Essays on Early Eucharistic Prayers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997). Bradshaw, P. F. (ed.), Eucharistic Origins (London: SPCK, 2004). Braude, W. (trans.), The Midrash on Psalms (Yale Judaica Series. 3 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). Brodie, T. L., The Gospel According to John: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Brown, R. E., The Death of the Messiah (London: Chapman, 1994). Brown, R. E., The Gospel according to John (The Anchor Bible. 2 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1966 and 1970). Bultmann, R., The Gospel of John: A Commentary (trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971). Burer, M. H., Divine Sabbath Work (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012). Caird, G. B., The Revelation of Saint John the Divine (London: A. & C. Black, 1966). Calduch-Benages, N., and J. Vermeylen (eds), Treasures of Wisdom: Studies in Ben Sira and the Book of Wisdom. Festschrift M. Gilbert (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999).

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Feehan, J., Creation, Evolution and Faith: Reflections on the Presence of God in Creation (Dublin: John Feehan, 2015). Feehan, J., Farming in Ireland: History, Heritage and Environment (Dublin: University College Dublin Faculty of Agriculture, 2003). Fiensy, D. A., and R. K. Hawkins (eds), The Galilean Economy in the Time of Jesus (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). Fortna, R. T., and T. Thatcher (eds), Jesus in Johannine Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). Francis (Pope). Laudato Si’: Encyclical Letter of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015). Freedman, D. N. (Editor in Chief), with associate editors G. A. Herion, D. F. Graf and J. D. Pleins (eds), The Anchor Bible Dictionary (6 vols; New York, Doubleday, 1992). Frey, J., and G. Kern (eds), Imagery in the Gospel of John: Terms, Forms, Themes, and Theology of Johannine Figurative Language (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). Freyne, S., Jesus a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story (London: T&T Clark, 2004). Freyne, S., The Jesus Movement and Its Expansion: Meaning and Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). García Martínez, F., The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (Second Edition; Leiden: Brill, 1996). Gebara, Y., Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress 1999). Gelston, A., The Eucharistic Prayer of Addai and Mari (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Gottlieb, R. S., This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2004). Gottlieb, R. S. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Guroian, V., Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). Habel, N. C., An Inconvenient Text: Is a Green Reading of the Bible Possible? (Adelaide: Australasian Theological Forum Press, 2009). Habel, N. C., The Birth, The Curse and the Greening of Earth: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1-11 (Earth Bible Commentary 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011). Habel, N. C., Finding Wisdom in Nature: An Eco-Wisdom Reading of the Book of Job (Earth Bible Commentary 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014). Habel, N. C., (ed.), Readings from the Perspective of Earth (The Earth Bible 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Habel, N. C., and V. Balabanski (eds), The Earth Story in the New Testament (Earth Bible 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). Habel, N. C., and P. Trudinger (eds), Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics (Atlanta: Society of Biblical literature, 2008). Habel, N. C., and P. Trudinger (eds), Water: A Matter of life and Death (Interface 14; Adelaide: Australasian Theological Forum, 2011). Haenchen, E., John: A Commentary on the Gospel of John (2 vols; trans. R. R. Funk; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). Haight, R., Jesus, Symbol of God (New York: Orbis, 2001). Hanson, K. C., and D. E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998). Hathaway, M., and L. Boff, The Tao of Liberation: Exploring the Ecology of Transformation (New York: Orbis, 2009).

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Harrington D. J., and A. J. Saldarini (trans.), Targum Jonathan of the Former Prophets (The Aramaic Bible 10; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987). Havea, J., D. J. Neville and E. Wainwright (eds), Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014). Hayward, C. T. R., The Jewish Temple: A Non-Biblical Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996). Hellholm, D., T. Vegge, O. Norderval and C. Hellholm (eds), Ablution, Initiation and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity, vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011). Hessel, D. T., and R. Radford Reuther (eds), Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the WellBeing of Earth and Humans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Hillel, D., The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Horrell, D. G., C. Hunt and C. Southgate, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010). Hoskyns, E. C., The Fourth Gospel (London: Faber and Faber, 1947). Hossfeld, F.-L., and E. Zenger, Psalms 2 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). Jasper, R. C. D., and G. J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987). Johnson, E. A., Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Jones, L. P., The Symbol of Water in the Gospel of John (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). Jones, P., D. Selby and S. Sterling (eds), Sustainability Education: Perspectives and Practice across Higher Education (Abingdon: Earthscan, 2010). Karris, R. J., Jesus and the Marginalized in John’s Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 1990). Klein, M. L., The Fragment-Targums of the Pentateuch according to Their Extant Sources, , vol. 2 (Analecta Biblica series; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1980). Koester, H., Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London: SCM, 1990). Lanfer, P. T., Remembering Eden: The Reception History of Genesis 3:22–24 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Lash, N., Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed (London: SCM, 1992). Lathrop, G. W., Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). Lawson, V. M. The Blessing of Mercy: Bible Perspectives and Ecological Challenges (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015. Le Carré, J. The Constant Gardener: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2001). Levenson, J. D., Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Lightfoot, R. H., St John’s Gospel: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). Lindars, B., The Gospel of John (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1972). Louw, J. P., and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains (2 vols; New York: United Bible Societies, 1988). Luttikhuizen, G. P. (ed.), Paradise Interpreted: Representations of Biblical Paradise in Judaism and Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Mackey, J. P., Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future among Religions (London: Continuum, 2006). Maher, M. (trans.), Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible 1B; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992).

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Malina, B. J., and R. L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998). McCabe, H. God, Christ and Us (New York: Continuum, 2003). McDonagh, S., Patenting Life? Stop! Is Corporate Greed Forcing Us to Eat Genetically Engineered Food? (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 2004). McGowan, A., Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Meals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). McKibben, B., The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2005). M. McNamara (trans.), Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible 1B; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992). McWhirter, J., The Bridegroom Messiah and the People of God: Marriage in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). McWilliams, B., Illustrated Weather Eye (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2012). Meyer, M. (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts (New York: HarperOne, 2007). Midgley, M., The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2003). Milavec, A., The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2003). Moloney, F. J., The Gospel of John (Sacra Pagina; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998). Muir, J., My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916). Neusner, J., A. J. Avery-Peck and W. S. Green (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Judaism (4 vols; Leiden: Brill, 2005). Norgaard, K. M., Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Osiek, C., and M. Y. Macdonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006). Person Jr, R., Deuteronomy and Environmental Amnesia (Earth Bible Commentary 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014). Power, D. N., The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992). Rahlfs, A., and R. Hanhart (trans. and ed.), Septuaginta, Editio Altera (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006). Reed, J., Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-Examination of the Evidence (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000). Reumann, J., The Supper of the Lord: The New Testament, Ecumenical Dialogue, and Faith and Order on Eucharist (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). Roberts, A., and J. Donaldson (trans.), Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, Vol. VIII and Vol. XVII (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1870). Rodgers, Z., M. Daly-Denton and A. Fitzpatrick-McKinley (eds), A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Sanders, E. P., Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE – 66 CE (London: SCM, 1992). Sanders, S. R., Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (Boston: Beacon, 1998). Schnackenberg, R., The Gospel according to Saint John (3 vols; London: Burns and Oates, 1980). Schneiders, S. M., The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). Scott, Jr, N. A., Negative Capability: Studies in the New Literature and the Religious Situation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).

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Index of References

The Jewish Scriptures/ The Old Testament Genesis 1.1-2.3 1.2 1.3 1.3-4 1.3-31 1.5 1.9 1.9-13 1.14 1.14-19 1.18-29 1.28 1.28-29 1.31 1.31-2.1 2.1 2.1-2 2.1-3 2.2 2.2-3 2.4-3.24 2.5 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.10-14 2.13 2.15 2.16 3.1-7 3.3

31 76, 96 32, 128 221 65 31 195 66 50 51, 128 166 60, 63 166 103 210 22 99 100 185, 211 183 31 58, 59 76, 127, 135, 184, 195, 211 14 15, 17, 183, 219, 220 17 20, 38, 122 122 13, 14, 17, 31, 58, 59, 102 58 31, 46 115, 149

3.4-5 3.7 3.8 3.14-15 3.19 3.22 3.24 3.25 6.13 7.17 7.21 8.1 8.11 8.13 8.17 8.22 9.4 9.20 13.10 15.1 17.17 18.4 20.13 22.6 22.8 22.13 24.10-61 24.32 28.10-17 28.12 28.13 28.17 29.1-20 37.25 48.22

131 58 215 76 149 115 115, 182, 219, 220 19 35 130 166 96 52 51 166 22 116 190 17 29 130 173 98 208 50, 207 50, 207 82 173 59 165 59 59 82 154 81

Exodus 2.16-22

82

3.1 3.2 3.14 4.23 9.31 12 12.2 12.10 12.13 12.15 12.18 12.21 12.21-22 12.23 12.33-34 12.46 14.21 15.10 15.17 15.27 16.1-30 16.4 16.10 16.18 16.31 16.35 17.1-7 17.6 19.4 19.19 20.4 20.8-11 20.10 23.14-17 25.18 28.6 30.11-16 30.22-38

139 36 113 34, 129 218 50 51, 71 205 70 71 71 207 205 70 71 206 96 76 2, 23, 126, 191 158 115 115 36 100 115 97 125 125, 126 97 164 72, 77 100 100 95 220 218 71 217

232

Index of References

30.25 30.34 30.34-35 33.20 34.6 34.28 40.2 40.17 40.16-33 40.24

153 24 155 36 36, 183 87 51 51 23 23

Leviticus 5.11 10.9 11.9-12 12.2-8 12.8 14 14.4 14.50-52 15.13 17.10-16 23.3 23.40 23.42 25 25.23 26.4

73 88 109 21 73 207 220 46 46 116 100 121, 158 121 101 69 91

Numbers 6.24-26 6.25 9.9-12 9.12 11.8 13.23 19.16-18 20.2-13 20.11 21.6-9 21.8-9 22.21-35 24.6 24.17 33.9

185 128 207 206 115 58 207 125 126 164 76 157 17, 217 51 158

Deuteronomy 2.14 96, 97 4.6 37 5.14 100

5.15 5.33 6.7 8.3 8.7 8.7-10 8.8 8.8-9 8.15 11.10 11.10-12 11.11 11.11-12 11.12 16.3-4 16.13-15 18.18 19.5 21.23 23.4 30.5 30.9 32.11

100 182 52 115, 179 56 162 58 56 56, 125 56 92, 121 81 14, 56 56 71 91, 121 44, 59 220 220 87 74 74 97

Joshua 2.6 24.31

218 183

Judges 1.16

158

1 Samuel 10.1 15.27-28 16.3 16.11 16.13 16.19 17.15 17.34-35 19.5 24.1-22 25.41 30.11

153 209 48 139 48 139 139 139, 143, 163 139 209 173 87

2 Samuel 7.14 7.15 15.2-6 15.19-23

36 210 49 201

15.21 15.23 15.30 15.31 17.1-3 17.3 21.17 22.43 23.1 23.2 23.3-4 23.6-7 24.1

163, 169, 201 150 201 179 201 150, 163 49 136 164 48 49, 61 189 131

1 Kings 1.32-40 1.38 3.5-14 3.9 3.26 4.33 6.15 6.18 6.29 6.32 6.34-35 8.2 8.11 8.64-66 11.26-12.24 11.29-31 11.36 15.4

157 122 28 61 97 61, 162, 205 19 19 19 19, 158 19 128 36, 128 128 209 143, 209 49 49

2 Kings 4.42-44 5.10 5.14 6.25 8.19 13.20-21 17.29-34 18.17 18.31 20.13 20.20 21.18 21.26 25.4

108 136 136 73 49 206 82 122 58 216 122 218 218 17, 18, 218

Index of References 1 Chronicles 15.27 218 21.1 131 29.15 69 2 Chronicles 5.3 16.14 28.15 29.17 36.23

128 216 158 51 69

Ezra 4.1-24 7.9 10.6

82 51 87

Nehemiah 2.8 3.1 3.15 3.15-16 8.13-18 8.15 8.16 9.15 9.25 13.19

17, 18, 127 95 17, 18 218 128 121 121 87, 117, 179 220 97

Esther 1.5 5.14 6.7-9 7.9

18 220 209 220

Job 1.6-12 9.8 9.9 10.9 12.7 12.7-10 26.10 28.12 28.12-23 28.13 28.23 33.30 34.14-15 37.1-5 38.8

131 113 50 136 157 144 25 28 61 182 182 129 35 164 196

38.8-11 38.11 38.24 38.31 39.5-8

113 119 76 50 157

Psalms 1.3 2.7 2.9 4.1 4.6 6.2 6.4-5 8.4. 8.6-8 16.11 17.9 17.15 18.10 18.33-36 18.42 19.4-6 22 22.1 22.7-8 22.12 22.16 22.18 22.26 23 23.6 24.1 24.2 24.3 25.10 27.2 29 31.10 33.6 34.14 34.20 36.8 36.8-9 36.9 37.11 41.9 45.8 45.10 46.4

220 36 206 152 128, 185 206 149 183 166 196 143 49 76 174 136 85, 196 49 208 208 143 143 111, 208 109, 111, 177 109 182 105 20 69 36 203 164 206 28, 211 185 206 123 99, 123, 128 19, 170 151 179 209, 217 98 122

233 51.7 51.8 52.8 53.5 55.12-14 56.13 65.9 65.9-10 65.9-13 69.1-2 69.9 72 72.6 72.8 72.16 74.19 77.19 77.20 78.16 78.19-25 78.20 78.24-25 78.52 78.54 80 80.1 84.1 84.1-3 84.5 84.6 85.10 86.15 89.26-27 89.36-37 90.2 91.4 91.5 91.12 92 92.12-13 92.12-15 95.4-5 95.7 96.10 96.12 101.8 102.23-24 102.25 104.3 104.3-4

207 206 19 206 179 129 81 85 14 113 73 61 165 74, 165 165, 223 52 96, 113 71 124 87, 117, 179 124 115 71, 139 23 190, 191 139, 140, 144 98 181 69 45 185 36 36 22 195 97 147 147 100 19 158 144, 165 144 220 18 49 149 98 96, 113 76

234 104.13-14 104.15 104.22-23 104.23

Index of References

104.24 104.29 104.29-30 107 107.14 107.20 107.23-27 107.30 110.1 110.7 113-118 114.8 115.7 116.3 116.16 118.10-12 118.27 119.59 119.101 120-134 122 126.5 124.4-5 132.17 137 138.8 141.7 143.8 145.16 145.21 147.15 147.18 148.3-6 150.6

92 63, 88 84 102, 129, 167 28 35, 162 211 113 152 29 113 113 166 123, 164 70, 205 45, 124 174 152 152 143 121 174 174 69 69 91 113 49 18 98 206 49 35 35 92 29 22 40, 211

Proverbs 1.7 1.24 3.5-7 3.13 3.18 3.19 4.11 6.6-11

41 35 41 28 116, 182, 220 28, 34 182 34

6.23 7.4 7.17 8.1-4 8.22-23 8.22-31 8.23 8.27 8.27-31 8.30 8.30-31 8.31 8.32-36 9.4-5 9.5 9.6 13.14 23.19 24.3 25.21 30.19 30.24-28 30.25 31.13

32 28 217 28 27 23 29, 31 25 28 34 197 168, 192 28 41 28, 65, 115 182 152 182 28 87 61, 162 61 34 218

Ecclesiastes 1.1 2.5-6 3.11 3.19-20 10.19

17 18 79 149 63

Song of Solomon 1.3 223 1.12-13 155, 222 2.11 143, 222 2.11-13 222 2.13 222 2.14 52 3.1-4 222 3.6 222 4.6 222 4.12 215 4.12-15 222 4.13 18 4.13-15 13 4.14 155, 217, 222 4.16 222 5.1 47, 173, 213

5.2 6.9 7.8 8.6 8.13 Isaiah 1.29-30 1.30 2.2-3 3.1 5.1 5.1-7 5.7 6.1 6.3 6.5 6.10 7.3 8.6 9.1-2 9.3 9.6 11.1-10 11.2 11.5 11.9 11.12 12.3 13.9 16.9-10 19.9-10 22.9-11 22.21 24 24.7 24.11 25.6 25.6-8 25.9 26.17-18 27.2-5 30.20 30.29 32.15 32.15-17 33.16 35.5-6

52 52 158 201, 222 47

13 215 25 87 190 190 190, 191 168 168 36 167, 168, 169, 174 122 122 128 91 98 60 48, 60 209 60 91 122 84 91 218 122 98 30, 65 65 65 65, 74, 90 39 65 195 190 87 69 127 185 87 74

Index of References 36.2 38.12 38.22 40-66 40.3 40.3-11 40.5 40.5-6 40.11 40.13 40.21 40.22 42.3 43.5-6 43.10-11 43.16 44.3 45.7 45.9 49.15 51.1-3 51.3 52.7 52.13 53 53.1 53.7 54.10 55 55.1 55.1-2 55.8-9 55.10-11 55.11 55.12 56.1-8 58.7 58.11 58.13-14 60.19-20 60.21 61.1 62.4 62.5 64.1 64.8 65.13-14 65.17 65.17-18

122 36 69 195 44, 182 49 45 35 139, 142 36 31 25 218 91 113 113 74, 85, 127 76 136 97 17 18, 45, 150 174 164 174 167 50, 142, 207 185 90 73 114, 167 28 29, 91, 115 29 18 101 187 215 100 100 183 36 73 221 59 98 38 100, 195 23

65.20 65.23 66.7 66.7-8 66.7-13 66.8 66.11 66.12 66.22 68.5

195 195 195 196 195 195 125, 195 185, 195 100, 185 98

Jeremiah 1.4 2.13 2.21 2.27 3.1-20 4.31 5.22 5.24 7.34 8.7 8.22 10.2 10.12 11.19 16.9 17.13 17.19-27 17.24-25 18.17 25.10 29.5 29.7 31.10 33.10-11 31.10-14 33.10-13 33.13 39.4 49.36 51.15 52.7

29 86 190 98 48 195 113 81 47, 48 157 154 50 28 142 47 86 97 101 151 47 102 102 151 47 140 47, 48 143 18 151 28 18, 218

Ezekiel 5.5 10.2 12.15 12.19

25 218 151 87

235 15.1-8 16 19.10-11 20.23 22.1 22.15 27.7 28.13-14 29.12 30.3 30.23 30.26 31.3-9 31.8-9 34 34.12 34.14 34.23

37 37.9-10 37.24 37.25 38.12 39.29 40-42 40.3 44.17-18 46.1-8 47 47.1 47.3-12 47.7 47.7-12 47.9 47.12

190 48 191 151 29 151 218 18, 19, 20 151 84 151 151 18 15 138 138 71, 110 138, 163, 210 101, 202 151 151 151 151 127 174 13, 74, 223 206 211 210 202 24, 25 74, 86 72 218 218 101 122, 220 167, 214 215 219 20 26, 86 86, 219

Daniel 4.12 12.2

166 148, 151, 206

34.23-24 36.1-15 36.4 36.19 36.24-36 36.25-26 36.25-27 36.35

236

Index of References

Hosea 2 6.2 11.1 11.8

48 66, 84 34, 129 97

Joel 1.1-12 2.21-22 2.28 2.28-29

91 58 127 74, 86

Amos 5.8 6.6 7.13 8.5 9.13 9.13-14

50 155 59 100 91 64, 91

Jonah 2.3

113

Micah 3.12 4.2 4.3-4 4.4

58 25 58 58

Zechariah 3.1 3.10 4.2 8.12 8.16-17 9.9-10 12.10 13.1 14.6-7 14.7 14.8 14.8-9 14.9 14.16 14.17 14.21

131 58 19 189 185 157 77, 158, 202 73, 123, 158, 215, 216 73 128 72, 122, 158 215 158 158 122 71, 72, 158

Malachi 2.10 4.5

98 44, 84

Deuterocanonical Books Tobit 11.19

63

Wisdom of Solomon 1.7 29 1.12 35 1.13 149 1.16 194 2.6-11 35, 62, 194 2.11 66 2.12-15 194 2.13 34 2.16 34 2.18 34 2.23-24 131 2.24 31 3.11 34 4.5 189 5.5 34 5.6 35 6.12 58 6.13 58 6.16 58 6.18 220 6.24 62 7.17-20 61, 162 7.22-8.1 27 7.24-26 160 7.25 27, 28 8.1 28, 41, 181 8.13 220 8.17 220 9.1-2 29, 34 9.1-4 62 9.3 61 9.9 79 9.10 28 9.16 75 9.18 29, 113, 115, 169 10.1 66 10.2 62

10.4 11.24 11.24-26 11.24-12.1 13.5 13.18-19 14.5 15.1 16.20-21 18.15 19.6

113 6, 48 7, 183 79 34 174 112 62 115 29 223

Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sira (Sirach) 1.1 33 7.15 197 13.16 166 15.3 116, 179 17.1-2 162 24.1-12 27 24.3 33 24.6-8 33 24.8 3, 35 24.8-12 28 24.13-16 38, 155 24.13-18 23 24.13-21 182 24.15 155 24.21 38, 86, 116 24.23-27 86 24.23-31 38 24.23-34 38 24.28 38 40.17 38 40.27 38 44.18 166 44.21 74, 165 48.17 122 49.10 206 50.3 20 50.6-7 22 50.7 22 50.8 23 50.10 23 50.12 23 50.19 22 Baruch 3.14

32, 128

Index of References 3.9 3.37

37 38

1 Maccabees 10.20 11.34 13.51 13.51-52

204 150 158 142

2 Maccabees 10.6-8 121 10.7 158 The New Testament Matthew 3.3 3.4-12 3.6 5.5 5.9 5.43-45 10.39 13.14 14.13-21 14.26 16.6 16.16 16.21 20.28 22.44 23.31 24.8 26.6-13 26.26-29 26.63-64 27.28 27.31 27.35 27.43 27.46 27.48 27.49 Mark 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.13

182 47 45, 46 151 34 34 163 168 105 113 71 147 66 142 166 34 195 152 110 143 204 208 208 208 208 206 214

46 45 47 139

237 John 1.1 1.1-18 1.3 1.4 1.4-5 1.5 1.6 1.6-7 1.6-8 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.9-13 1.11-13 1.12 1.12-13 1.13 1.14

15.36

168 92 105 113 105 111 111 163 31 142 182 75, 78, 148 49 166 195 173 154 152 110 143 208 208 208 49, 208 206

Luke 1.15 3.3 3.7-14 7.36-50 7.44 7.46 8.10 9.11-17 10.3 16.19 16.22 16.23 17.33 22.17-20 22.66-71 23.34 23.35 24.7 24.21 24.46

88 46 47 152 173 153 168 105 142 204 130 39 163 110 143 208 208 66 66 66

1.19 1.23 1.24 1.24-25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29

4.12 4.26-29 6.32-44 6.49 8.1-9 8.8 8.20 8.35 10.6 10.45 10.52 12.23 12.26 12.36 13.8 13.16 14.3 14.3-9 14.22-24 14.61-64 15.20 15.24 15.29 15.34

1.15 1.16 1.16-18 1.17 1.18

1.31 1.32 1.33 1.35 1.35-42 1.36 1.36-39 1.38-39

39, 178 27 32, 34, 223 129 128 32, 185, 192 136 43 27, 43 43 49 32, 33, 50, 185 34, 192 128 114 196 37, 99 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 45, 49, 67, 83, 97, 98, 107, 168, 192, 211, 220 27, 43, 49 40 37 37, 38, 183 36, 39, 97, 114, 168, 175, 178 43 44, 180, 182 43 43 45, 137 49, 138 43, 44 19, 50, 51, 54, 65, 84, 142, 192, 193, 194, 206, 207, 211 48 52, 60, 127, 142 48, 127 65, 117 59 50, 51, 142, 206 58 182

238 1.39 1.41 1.43 1.43-51 1.44 1.45 1.48 1.49 1.50-51 1.51 2.1 2.1-11 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14-16 2.16 2.17 2.19-20 2.20 2.21

2.22 3.1 3.1-21 3.2 3.3 3.3-8 3.4 3.5 3.5-8 3.6 3.8 3.12 3.13 3.14.

Index of References 59, 83 51, 58 55, 58, 65, 157 59 95 57, 58, 67 58 59, 156 58 59, 165 63, 65, 84, 221 48, 90, 221 90 66 64, 82 90 64, 90 66, 168 69 69, 70, 84 158 72, 79, 97, 98, 141, 181 3 66 72 24, 25, 26, 89, 126, 181, 214, 217, 220 184 216 73 74, 83 74, 77, 148 196 125 74, 77, 136, 137, 148 127 75 76, 80, 127, 211 7, 53, 75, 89, 107, 171, 231 59, 70, 85, 165 76, 164, 174, 216

3.14-16 3.15 3.16

3.16-17 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.19-21 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 3.25-30 3.26 3.28 3.29 3.29-30 3.31 3.34 3.35 3.36 4.1-2 4.5 4.6 4.6-7 4.7-15 4.8 4.10 4.11-12 4.12 4.13-14 4.13-15 4.14 4.15 4.21-23 4.21-24 4.23 4.24 4.27 4.28

77 164 48, 77, 78, 79, 80, 114, 125, 144, 167, 181, 187, 191, 192 192 79, 168, 169 77, 114 49, 75, 148, 192, 193 84, 128 140, 193 74, 131, 184 53 45 44 43 50 136 47, 48, 53, 63, 84, 196, 221 50 75 127, 214, 224 97, 144, 164, 165, 181 77, 114, 163 53 81 8, 83, 84 205 126, 214 81 8, 85, 88, 90, 93, 179 82 13, 81 116 114 86, 88, 89, 93, 221 82, 114 97 182 84, 158 81, 126 83 82

4.28-30 4.31-34 4.34 4.35 4.35-38 4.36 4.38 4.39-42 4.42 4.46 4.50 4.52 5.2 5.2-18 5.3 5.3b-4 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.11 5.14 5.15 5.16-18 5.17 5.18 5.19 5.19-20 5.19-30 5.20 5.20-23 5.21 5.24-25 5.29 5.30 5.33 5.33-35 5.34 5.35 5.39 5.46 6.1 6.1-14 6.4 6.5

36 81, 169 81, 85, 99, 196 1, 91, 145 61 158 92 168 81, 83, 168, 193 96 96 83, 84 95 100 96 95 135 29, 113 148 84, 96, 100 96 96, 157 96 97 29, 81, 85, 97, 99 97, 101 34, 99, 184 37, 169, 196 101 101 97 96, 148 148 148 180 131 43 169 49, 84 5, 128, 184, 219, 221 184 105 81, 89, 177 84, 106 107, 118

Index of References 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.14 6.16 6.16-21 6.17 6.19 6.20 6.22 6.24 6.26 6.27 6.28

6.28-29 6.29 6.31 6.32 6.33 6.34 6.35

6.37 6.39 6.40 6.41 6.41-42 6.42 6.44 6.45 6.47 6.48 6.48-51 6.50 6.51 6.51c

89, 108, 109, 119, 186 7, 106 111, 118, 184 111, 112, 118 111 113 119 106 112, 113 113 112 106 111, 167 107, 108, 114, 179 3, 10, 40, 47, 52, 66, 79, 92, 102, 117, 131, 144, 145, 159, 166, 169, 184, 186, 187, 197, 211 119 113, 114 180 97 115, 117, 183, 192 114 38, 108, 114, 115, 116, 164, 221 115, 138 116, 148 114, 116, 148 165 116, 148 137 116, 148 101 114 114, 115 97 115 87, 115, 129, 165, 212 116

6.51c-58 6.54 6.55 6.56 6.58 6.59 6.60 6.62 6.63 6.64 7.1 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.20 7.23 7.24 7.27 7.37 7.37-38 7.37-39 7.38

7.38-39 7.39 7.45 7.48 7.49 7.50-52 7.52 7.53 7.53-8.11 8.3-11 8.12 8.21 8.24 8.28 8.29 8.31 8.31-32 8.31-36 8.32 8.34

90, 110, 116, 189, 214 116, 148 90, 116, 167, 186 189 165 106 116 59, 85, 116, 165, 175, 192 126, 187 179 121 121 193 70 131 100, 141 185 137 124 196 81, 89, 167, 26, 89, 90, 124, 214, 215, 222 216 126, 174, 182, 210 129 141 141, 216 74, 216 127 182 127, 141 82 19, 53, 85, 127, 128, 174 194 137 164, 180 202 129, 179 129, 183 132 131, 133 193

239 8.35 8.36 8.40 8.41 8.42-44 8.44 8.45 8.45-46 8.48 8.56 8.58 8.59 9 9.1 9.1-7 9.3 9.4 9.4-5 9.5 9.7 9.8-9 9.12 9.16 9.17 9.21 9.22 9.24 9.27 9.29 9.34 9.35 9.41 10 10.1 10.1-6 10.1-18 10.3 10.4 10.6 10.7-9 10.8 10.9 10.10

10.11

129, 182, 196 73, 133 131, 183 34, 129 130 31, 131, 183, 197 132 131 82, 131 130 113 165 144 135 100, 135 147 84, 137 135 53 122 136 136 137 136 136, 137 9, 38, 179 137 137 13, 137 138 138, 157 137, 193 48, 135, 138 145 140 135 67, 140, 169 140 140, 189 140 138, 141 169 2, 80, 92, 106, 137, 139, 140, 169, 183 139, 141, 150, 163, 167, 174, 203

240 10.11-18 10.13 10.14 10.14-15 10.15 10.16 10.17 10.17-18 10.18 10.20 10.21 10.22 10.26-30 10.27 10.28 10.29 10.29-30 10.30 10.31 10.40 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.7 11.8 11.9 11.9-10 11.10 11.11 11.12 11.16 11.18 11.20 11.25 11.25-26 11.27 11.35 11.39 11.41-42 11.43-44 11.44 11.48 11.49-50 11.50 11.51 11.51-52

Index of References 110, 141 141, 145, 156 141 178 203 161 203 163 174, 175 131 135 142, 143 135 143 143, 165, 203 165 144 197 143, 165 45, 147 96 152 147 147 147 150 83, 84, 128, 147 147, 174 128 152 169 201 147 182 78, 147 147, 150 147 149 149, 155, 217, 223 184 169 152, 218 150 13, 150, 201 159, 163 150 151, 210

11.52 11.54 11.55 12.1 12.1-8 12.1-10 12.2 12.3

12.4 12.5-6 12.7 12.10-11 12.12 12.13 12.14 12.16 12.17 12.17-18 12.19 12.20-21 12.20-23 12.23 12.24 12.25 12.26 12.27 12.32

12.32-33 12.33 12.34 12.35 12.35-36 12.37 12.38 12.39-41 12.40 12.41 12.42 12.46 12.47

34, 150, 151, 161, 186, 197 150 84 44, 152, 153, 182 216, 221 147 152, 155 22, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 168, 223 152 96, 108 153, 155 152, 159 156 156, 157, 202 156, 202 184 159 152 158, 159, 192 161 191 161 92, 162, 169, 174 163, 192 163, 169, 201 168, 201 25, 150, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 181, 210, 217, 223 59 165, 223 49 128 84, 147, 174 168 174 184 167, 169, 174 167, 168 9, 38, 179 128 79, 81, 168, 169, 171, 193

12.48 12.50 13 13.1

13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.8 13.12 13.13-14 13.14 13.14-15 13.15 13.16 13.17 13.18 13.23 13.25 13.26 13.27 13.27-30 13.29 13.30 13.34 13.35 13.37 13.38 14.2 14.6 14.9 14.10 14.12 14.13-14 14.15 14.16 14.17 14.21 14.23 14.23-24

148 180 178 84, 117, 140, 141, 164, 182, 192, 201, 205, 210, 221, 223 131 144, 164, 165, 173, 181 210 173 174 175, 210 63 153, 174, 175 110, 216 2, 9, 114, 174, 180 83, 136, 174 196 179 39, 178 39, 178 178 131, 187 179 96, 108, 156, 178 84, 197, 203 2, 175, 179, 180, 187, 194 181, 187 174, 201 83 98, 181 131, 169, 182, 183, 219 183 101, 102 101, 183, 184 184 180 184, 211, 222 182 180 98, 182 180

Index of References 14.26 14.27 14.31 15.1 15.2 15.5 15.6 15.9 15.10 15.11 15.12 15.13 15.14 15.15 15.18-19 15.19 15.20 15.22 15.24 15.25 16.2 16.6 16.7 16.8-9 16.9 16.11 16.12 16.12-13 16.13 16.19-20 16.20 16.21 16.21-22 16.22 16.24 16.28 16.32 16.33 17 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.5 17.11 17.11-12

9, 184, 189, 221, 224 78, 185, 193 178, 180, 201 14, 190, 196, 197 122 189 190 180 180, 182 85, 196 2, 180 150, 203, 212 152 101, 196 193 192, 194 152, 212 193 193 212 9, 38, 179 194, 196 131, 174, 182, 184, 222 129, 194 194 193 189 9 131, 185 195 195 192, 194, 195 196 195 196 192 182, 201, 202 193 197 197 144, 165, 166, 167, 183 85, 137, 176 30 151, 180, 197 203

17.12 17.13 17.15 17.16 17.17 17.18 17.19 17.20-21 17.21 17.22 17.23 17.24 18.1 18.1-2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.7 18.8-9 18.10 18.10-11 18.11 18.12 18.15 18.17 18.18 18.25-27 18.26 18.28 18.36 18.37 18.39 18.40 19.1-3 19.2 19.5 19.7 19.13 19.14 19.15 19.17 19.18 19.23 19.23-24 19.23-25 19.24

179 196 193 193 131, 194 180 197 197 180 180 180 20, 31 187, 201, 202, 217 201, 202 203 203, 208 57 57 203 142 175 205 203 36, 203 142 203, 222 142 187, 202, 217 203, 205 192 60, 131, 203, 212 205 140 204 204 203 175 203, 204 83, 203, 205 140 208, 215 208 208 111 209 208

241 19.25 19.27 19.28 19.29 19.29-30 19.30

19.31 19.34

19.34-35 19.35 19.36 19.37 19.38 19.39 19.39-40 19.40 19.40-42 19.41 19.41-42 20 20.1 20.5-8 20.9 20.14 20.15 20.17 20.17-18 20.19 20.20 20.21 20.21-23 20.22

20.22-23 20.25 20.26 20.26-29

1, 210 182 205 207 205 22, 91, 127, 210, 216, 221, 222 205, 210, 220 26, 89, 126, 127, 158, 175, 196, 213, 214, 222 89, 123 206, 213 206, 214 77, 164, 202 74, 216 73, 154, 216, 222, 223 22, 155 180, 218 222 13, 45, 217, 218, 219 202 213 53, 84, 189, 218, 220, 221 218 184 143 13, 202 70, 197, 222 83 178, 189, 211, 221 221 39, 60, 101, 180, 211 55, 166 127, 184, 186, 195, 210, 211, 216, 221, 222 211, 216 208 178, 221 221

242 20.27 20.29 20.31 20.31-32 21 21.1 21.8 21.11 21.12 21.9 21.15 21.15-17 21.16 21.18-19 21.22

Index of References 153, 208 10, 196 8, 60, 63, 122, 142 10 142 105 167 215 175, 176 89 142 142 142 175 116

Acts of the Apostles 2.29 218 3.20-21 195 9.2 182 15.29 116 16.14 204 19.9 182 28.26-27 168 Romans 1.19-20 5.12 6.23 10.16 11.8 14.21 15.12

34 149 149 167 168 88 60

1 Corinthians 5.7 207 5.8 71 10.1-4 126 11.23-25 110, 175 15.4 66 15.25 166 15.25-28 195 15.27 166 15.36 162 2 Corinthians 5.1 36 5.4 36

Galatians 3.13

220

1 Thessalonians 5.2-3 195 1 Timothy 5.10

173

Ephesians 1.22

166

Hebrews 2.6-8 9.9-10 10.20 11.11

166 46 182 137

1 John 1.1 1.3 1.6 1.7 2.6 2.7 2.20 2.27 3.8 3.9 3.11-24 3.16 3.16-17 4.7 4.14 5.4 5.6 5.18

180, 194 177 131 177 174 180 153 153 31 74 187 175 142 74 168 74 214 74

2 John 5

180

3 John 15

152

Revelation 1.5 2.7 3.12

212 18, 93, 116, 220 223

3.20 5.6 5.12 6.6 7.9 7.17 11.18 12.9 13.8 14.18-19 15.6 17.2 18.3 18.12 19.9 19.14 21.1 21.1-2 21.1-3 21.2 21.3-5 21.5 21.6 21.23 22.1 22.1-2 22.2 22.5 22.14 22.17

39 51 51 109 158 90 131 131, 183 51 191 218 90 90 218 39, 173 218 105 223 79 18 143 184, 223 90 100 90 215 219, 220 100, 128 18 90

Josephus Against Apion 1.19 15 2.193 25 1.198 26 Jewish Antiquities 3.145-146 24 3.180-181 23 3.180-182 24 3.183 218 4.203-204 70 7.347 215 8.102 155 8.186 215 9.288 82 10.11 15

Index of References 10.46 14.173 15.4 15.11 17.198-199 18.5.2 20.6

219 204 64 191 216 47 81

Jewish War 1.61 2.10 2.224 2.280 3.41-43 4.324 4.456 4.472 5.4.2 5.5 5.212-214 5.217 5.218 6.6 6.9.3 6.421 6.423-426 7.189

218 70 70 70 56 25 86 86 95 191 24 24 25, 217 13 70 70 70 86

Philo Allegorical Interpretation 2.21.86 125 On the Embassy to Gaius 4.1 168 On the Life of Moses 1.11.61 139 On the Creation of the World 16-20 30 34 30 38.133 86 On the Special Laws 1.12 70 1.66-67 24 1.69-70 70

1.84 1.296 2.15 2.156 2.159-161

218 24 71 71 71

Questions and Answers on Exodus 2, 73-81 24 Questions and Answers on Genesis 1.4 76 1.57 182 That the Worse Attacks the Better 115-118 125 Who Is the Heir? 196-197 25 199-200 25 226 25 Pseudepigrapha 1 Enoch 10.18-19 24-25 26.1 30-32 42.1-2 89.45 89.45-48

64 220 25 22 33 50 207

2 Enoch 33.1-2

221

2 Baruch 4.2-4 29.5-6 29.5-8 29.7 29.8 32.6

130 64 156 76 114 52

4 Ezra 2.12 3.13-14

22 130

243 4.30 7.75 8.52

31 52 18, 110

Apocalypse of Abraham 9.6-7 15.18-20

130 130

Apocalypse of Adam and Eve 29.2-4 21 Jubilees 1.29 3.9 3.15-16.35 3.27 3.28 4.26 8.12-21 8.19 22.14 32.19 49.13

52 21 102 21 157 21 21 21, 25 151 151 206

Letter of Aristeas 83 26 88-90 214 89-91 20 Odes of Solomon 6.1 76 Psalms of Solomon 17.18-19 86 17.32 60 18.10-12 51, 86 Pseudo-Philo LAB 4.5 LAB 10.7 LAB 12.8-9 LAB 18.10-11 LAB 23.12 LAB 26.15 LAB 28.4-5 LAB 30.4 LAB 51.4-6

22 126 191 191 191 128 190 191 49

244

Index of References

Testament of Abraham 10-15 130 Testament of Daniel 5.12 18 Testament of Levi 18.10-11 18 Targums (Aramaic Bible) Fragmentary Targum Exod. 20.8 100 Targum Neofiti Gen. 3.8 Targum PseudoJonathan Gen. 2.7-9.

Aquinas, Thomas Summa contra Gentiles 1, 2, c.3 40 Augustine Homilies on John’s Gospel 40.10 79 The Trinity 2, 3 138

29–30

19

Cyprian Ep. 63 Ep. 63.8

88 214

Epiphanius Pan. 30.16.1 Pan. 30.26.1

47 47

46 46 46 60 60

Rabbinic Writings b. Sukkah 536 20 Gen. Rab. 11.5 99 m. Mid. 3.8 191 m. Sanh. 10.2 179 m. Tamid 7.4 100 Midr. Teh. 57.3 209 Mek. Šabb. 2.25 99 t. Sotah 15.9-15 88 t. Sukkah 4.9 122 y. Sukkah 5.1 127 Christian Writings 1 Clement 20

136 88

Didachē Did. 7.2 Did. 9.2 Did. 9.3, 4

Dead Sea Scrolls Community Rule 1QS III, 2-9 1QS III, 4-9 1QS IV, 21-23 4QFlorilegium 4QIsaiah Pesher

Apostolic Tradition 21 21.31-37

86, 125

87, 136 191 112

Eusebius Eccl. Hist. 7.32.17-18 71 Gospel of Peter 2.7 Gospel of Philip 73

205

149

Gospel of Thomas 13 124 40 191

Dial. 46 Dial. 69 Dial. 71 Dial. 114 Dial. 120 Dial. 138.1

46 125 220 125 125 221

Letter of Barnabas Barn. 15.8-9 221 Oxyrhynchus Papyri Fragment 840 123 Pseudo-Clementines Hom. 11.28 47 Tatian Oratio adversus Graecos 6.813 99 Greco-Roman Sources Arrian Expedition of Alexander VI, 29 16 Dio Chrysostom Kingship 1.15-16

139

Juvenal Satires III.14

111

Pliny Natural History 12.35

154

Pliny the Younger Letters Ep. 2.6 87

Irenaeus Adv. Haer. 1.28.1 Adv. Haer. 5.1.3

88 88

Suetonius The Lives of the Caesars Tib. 32 141

Justin 1 Apol. 35.6 1 Apol. 135 Dial. 41.4

204 125 221

Virgil Aeneid 1.279 186 Aeneid 6.847-853 186

Index of Authors

Alexander, P. 21, 26, 86 Allchin, A. M. 90 Amos, C. 222 Andrews, E. D. 186 Andrews, F. 186 Ashton, J. 6, 30, 32, 33, 35, 61, 75, 83, 128, 143, 183, 220 Aviam, M. 20, 57 Balabanski, V. 192 Barker, M. 5, 23, 26, 72, 126, 191 Barrett, C. K. 176 Barton, S. C. 76 Beattie, T. 63 Berry, T. 185, 224 Berry, W. E. 67, 163, 197 Boff, L. 4, 8, 40, 54, 80, 119, 149, 181, 198 Boureaux, C. 198, 205 Boyarin, D. 30, 33 Bovon, F. 123 Bradshaw, P. F. 110, 176 Braude, W. 209 Bremner, J. M. 13 Brodie, T. L. 136, 137, 181, 184, 223 Brown, J. K. 52 Brown, R. E. 58, 65, 178, 207, 213 Bultmann, R. 116 Burer, M. H. 99, 101 Burton-Christie, D. 40 Cahill, M. J. 117 Caird, G. B. 90 Calduch-Benages, N. 154 Callahan, A. D. 106 Canning, J. 132 Capon, R. F. 65, 198 Caragounis, C. C. 189 Carson, R. 48

Carter, W. 52, 72, 77, 78, 112, 139, 141, 186 Chilton, B. 110, 117 Code, L. 144, 145 Coloe, M. 26 Crossan, J. D. 110, 177 Culpepper, R. A. 89, 214 Cuming, G. J. 176 Daly-Denton, M. 50, 89, 110, 124, 125, 126, 166, 179, 206, 210, 216 Dalley, S. 15, 16, 17 Danker, F. W. 204 Daube, D. 206 Davis, E. F. 4, 9, 41, 67, 170, 187, 197 Diercks, G. F. 89 Dodd, C. H. 101, 130, 150, 156 Donaldson, J. 47 Dunn, J. D. G. 75, 181 Du Rand, J. A. 223 Eaton, J. 123 Edwards, D. R. 49, 156, 204, 209 Elvey, A. F. 186 Esler, P. F. 154, 216 Feehan, J. 21, 159, 160, 170, 199 Firmage, E. 73, 138, 157 Fortna, R. T. 175 Francis (Pope) 80, 103, 119, 132, 145, 159, 169, 170, 194, 199 Frayer-Griggs, D. 135 Freyne, S. 46, 47, 57, 72, 84, 98, 123, 150 García Martínez, F. 46, 60 Gebara, Y. 32, 133, 171, 187 Gelston, A. 176 Giles, R. 186 Goshen-Gottstein, A. 31, 199 Gourges, M. 84

246

Index of Authors

Grim, J. 1 Guroian, V. 198 Habel, N. C. 5, 31, 35, 60, 61, 166, 196 Haenchen, E. 148, 196, 204, 208, 214, 224 Haight, R. 4 Hanson, K. C. 7, 72 Harrington, D. J. 209, Hart, H. St J. 158 Hathaway, M. 80 Haught, J. F. 9 Hayward, C. T. R. 22, 71, 191 Healey, J. 185 Hendel, R. 129 Hiebert, T. 212 Hillel, D. 55 Horrell, D. G. 140 Hoskyns, E. C. 10, 39 Hossfeld, F. L. 69 Hunt, C. 140 Hütterman, A. 3 Jacob, I. 109, 154, 155, 158, 162, 190, 204, 205, 217 Jacob, W. 109, 154, 155, 158, 162, 190, 204, 205, 217 Jasper, R. C. D. 176 Johnson, E. A. 99 Jones, L. P. 89 Karris, R. J. 96, 108, 156 Klein, M. L. 100 Kitzberger, I. R. 10 Koester, H. 116 Labahn, M. 3, 175, 181 Lanfer, P. T. 19, 20, 96, 182 Lapin, P. 158 Lash, N. 54, 95, 99, 102, 127, 132, 138, 145, 187, 194, 199, 203, 211, 223 Lathrop, G. W. 54 Lawson, V. M. 97 Leach, H. M. 15 Le Carré, J. 99 Lee, D. 136, 217 Levenson, J. D. 23, 24, 51, 100 Lightfoot, R. H. 8, 56, 89, 174 Lindars, B. 184, 213 Louw, J. P. 52, 72, 109, 111

McCabe H. 99 McCollough, C. T. 63 McDonagh, S. 170 Macdonald, M. Y. 177 McGowan, A. 88 McGuckin, J. A. 79 Mackey, J. P. 162 McKibben, B. 67, 80, 119 McNamara, M. 30 McWhirter, J. 47 McWilliams, B. 112 Maher, M. 19 Malina, B. J. 50, 52, 65, 72, 108, 136, 142, 174, 202 Manconi, R. 208 Mare, W. H. 122, 123 Matthews, V. H. 154 Mattila, S. L. 106 Meeks, W. 180 Menken, M. J. J. 125 Meyer, M. 149 Meyers, C. 19 Mickens, R. 87 Midgley, M. 4, 145 Milavec, J. 191 Moloney, F. J. 32 Moore, S. D. 213 Morton, J. 140 Muir, J. 144 Nida, E. A. 52, 72, 109, 111 Norgaard, K. M. 170 Oakman, D. E. 7, 72 O’Connell, A. 144 Oleson, J. P. 17, 91, 122, 123 O’Loughlin, T. 186 Osiek, C. 177 Painter, J. 66 Person, R. Jr. 141 Piper, R. A. 154, 216 Polinger Foster, K. 15 Powell, M. A. 154 Power, D. N. 176 Primentas, N. 209 Pronzato, R. 208 Raphael, C. N. 122, 143 Ray, W. D. 176

Index of Authors Reed, J. 57 Reed, S. A. 109 Reumann, J. 176 Riesner, R. 44 Roberts, A. 47 Rohrbaugh, R. L. 50, 52, 65, 72, 108, 136, 142, 174, 202 Rossing, B. 78 Rubin, R. 25 Rushton, K. P. 40, 195 Rützler, K. 207 Saldarini, A. J. 209 Sanders, E. P. 70 Sanders, S. R. 67 Schnackenberg, R. 78 Schaper, J. 219 Schneiders, S. M. 82, 83, 213, 222 Schottroff, L. 82, 93 Scott, Jr, N. A. 53, 67 Slayton, J. C. 115 Smith, D. E. 177 Smith, R. W. 45 Southgate, C. 140 Strange, J. F. 57, 95 Suggit, J. N. 224 Suzuki, D. 144 Swearer, D. K. 8 Swinburne, H. 215

247

Thatcher, T. 175 Thomas, J. C. 178 Thompson, F. 223 Trainor, M. 4 Tucker, M. E. 1, 9, 40, 41, 170 Tyas, R. 115, 205, 215 Um, S. T.

86

Vanier, J.

184

Wainwright, E. 27 Watson, L. 21, 160 Watts, N. 103 Webster, J. S. 177 White, L. 60 Wilkins, J. 212 Williams, C. H. 113 Wink, W. 59 Wirzba, N. 14, 41, 65, 70, 102, 103, 107, 117, 118, 146, 163, 192 Witherington III, B. 178 Worland, J. 119 Wright, C. G. H. 98 Wyatt, N. 202 Yadin, Y.

209

Zenger, E. 69 Zimmermann, R.

219