by Jack Miles
HE RAISES A DEAD FRIEND TO LIFE AS A SIGN
After escaping unscathed when his blasphemous “Before Abraham was, I AM” provokes a crowd to attempt to stone him in the Temple, Jesus avoids the Temple for a time. Then, in some adjacent region of Judea, he restores sight to a blind man. This miracle—unique among all those attributed to Jesus—does not stimulate immediate acclaim but, rather, a hostile investigation (John 9). It survives the investigation and later underlies a popular rejoinder, already quoted, to the charge that Jesus is possessed: “Could a devil open the eyes of the blind?” (John 10:21).
In any event, Jesus soon ventures into the Temple again, but the previous confrontation quickly recurs when he provokes the crowd with another blasphemous remark.
The Jews gathered around him and said, “How much longer are you going to leave us hanging? If you are the Messiah, say so openly.” Jesus replied:
I have said so, but you do not believe.
The works I perform in my Father’s name are my proof,
But you do not believe
Because you are not my sheep.
The sheep that belong to me hear my voice.
I know them, and they follow me.
I give them eternal life.
They shall never perish.
No one shall ever snatch them from my hand.…
No one shall ever steal them from the Father’s hand.
The Father and I are one.
The Jews picked up stones to stone him. Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of them are you stoning me?” “Not for doing a good work,” the Jews answered him, “but for blasphemy. Though you are only a man, you are claiming to be God.” Jesus answered: …
If I am not doing my Father’s work,
you need not believe me. But if I am,
then even if you do not believe in me,
believe in the work I do.
Then you will know for sure
that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.
(John 10:24–34, 37–38)
They make another attempt to arrest him, but again he escapes; and this time he withdraws farther, to the far side of the Jordan River, to the spot where John the Baptist had worked and where his own public career had been inaugurated. “Many people came to him, and they said, ‘John performed no sign, but all he said about this man was true.’ And many believed in him” (John 10:41–10:42). What John said of Jesus was cryptic when he said it and remains cryptic. He said that Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, that he would baptize with the Holy Spirit, and that he was the bridegroom “who comes from above.” Even at this late point in the story, Jesus cannot be said to have demonstrated the meaning, much less the truth, of any one of these three contentions. If people are beginning to believe what John said about Jesus, it can only be because they expect that the proof and the clarification will come in due time. And theirs may be an expectation linked to the theme that has been growing steadily more prominent in Jesus’ discourse: the recovery of eternal life that he promises to accomplish, somehow, by his own death.
This was the theme that he first struck when Nicodemus visited him by night after Jesus’ first, aggressive confrontation with the Temple authorities. He said then that Nicodemus would have to be born anew in water and the Spirit. How would this happen? Speaking perhaps to himself, Jesus said that it would come about when he was “lifted up” like the serpent that Moses had lifted up in the desert. Now, no longer speaking in such indecipherable code, no longer at a private meeting under cover of darkness but in public and within the Temple precinct, he has promised that “whoever keeps my word / will never see death” (John 8:51). His maximally public and highly controversial restoration of sight to a blind man has given a kind of advance credibility to this larger, far less easily credible promise. New disciples are coming to him in such numbers that some synagogues have threatened their members with expulsion if they consort with him (9:22). Nicodemus, though not mentioned, is still an influential figure in Jerusalem and cannot be unaffected by this ferment.
At this moment of heightened promise and heightened threat, word is sent across the Jordan to Jesus: “Lord, the man you love is ill” (11:3). The man in question is Lazarus, who lives with his sisters, Mary and Martha, in Bethany, not far from Jerusalem. Jesus’ followers are reluctant to see him expose himself to new danger: “Rabbi, it is not long since the Jews were trying to stone you; are you going back there again?” (11:8). Jesus knows as the message reaches him that Lazarus is dead, but he delays his departure for two days, and the journey to Bethany on foot takes another two days. As he nears the village, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days, and it is Martha who comes to the outskirts of the village to greet Jesus:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died, but even now I know that God will grant whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said, “I know that he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said:
“I am the resurrection and the life.
Whoever believes in me, even if he has died, will live.
And whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”
“Yes, Lord,” she said. “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.” (11:21–27)
As they proceed together toward Lazarus’s tomb, Mary comes toward Jesus, throws herself, weeping, at his feet, and says:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
At the sight of her tears and those of the Jews who had come with her, Jesus, greatly distressed, shuddered and said, “Where have you put him?”
They said, “Lord, come and see.”
Jesus wept, and the Jews said, “You can see how much he loved him!”
But some remarked, “He opened the eyes of the blind man. Could he not have done something to prevent this man’s death?”
Shuddering once again, Jesus reached the tomb, which was a cave with a stone across the entrance. He said, “Take the stone away.”
Martha said to him, “Lord, by now he will stink. This is the fourth day since he died.”
Jesus replied, “Have I not told you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” So they took the stone away. Then Jesus lifted up his eyes and said:
Father, I thank you for hearing me.
I know that you always do,
but I speak for all those who are standing near me
that they may believe that it is you who have sent me.
When he had said this, he cried in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” The dead man came forth, his feet and hands bound with burial bands, and a cloth covering his face. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him. Let him go free.” (11:32–44)
When Mary, a dear friend, addresses Jesus as kurios, the word cannot be translated as “sir”; it can only be rendered as “Lord.” And even though the word as used here cannot be equated without qualification with kurios as used of the Lord God in the Old Testament, the echoes of that usage are both loud and intended.
In short, lest there be any doubt that Jesus meant what he said when he claimed identity with God at his last appearances in the Temple, any doubt that his promise of life was to be taken at full strength, he dispels it at this moment and by this act. Those who remark “He opened the eyes of the blind man. Could he not have done something to prevent this man’s death?” are reacting just as he intends them to react. Yes, he could have prevented Lazarus’s death. There is a great deal that God could prevent but does not. Yes, it is a fair inference that one who could grant sight to a man born blind might be able to raise the dead. The miracle, coming just after Jesus’ astounding promise of eternal life, is intended to make that point. And Martha is not mistaken, either, when she says that her brother “will rise again at the resurrection on the last day.” This rema
ins the resurrection that matters. But to make his point, to make his meaning clear and his power unmistakable, Jesus allows Lazarus to die, waits until his corpse is putrefying, and then restores him to life. What “Before Abraham was, I AM” and “The Father and I are one” are in words, the raising of Lazarus is in act. It is a claim outrageous and unbelievable but also arresting and thrilling.
HE IS MARKED FOR DEATH, THEN EXALTED AS KING
Many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what he did, believed in him, but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them about it. Then the chief priests and Pharisees called a meeting of their council. “This man is performing many signs,” they said. “What should we do? If we let him go on in this way, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our Temple and our nation.” But one of them said, “You still haven’t grasped the real situation. You don’t see that it is more to your advantage that one man should die for the people than that the whole nation should perish”.… From that day on, they were determined to kill him. (John 11:45–50, 53)
Israel, now so brutally oppressed by Caesar, came into existence as a nation through a fabulously successful revolt against Pharaoh. The memory of that triumph is a memory with politically explosive potential. The Jerusalem religious leadership tacitly takes it as a given that, should a revolt break out against Rome, God will not drown Caesar’s army in the Mediterranean as he drowned Pharaoh’s in the Red Sea. Any “messiah” who provokes the nation to think otherwise, they clearly believe, will only lead it to destruction. The leaders dare not repudiate the old hopes, but they dare not trust them either. And in their caution, the leaders make no mistake. They are right in what they expect of the Romans. They are equally right in what they no longer expect of God. The choice Rome has offered them is the classic oppressor’s choice: Either you police yourselves or we police you. In defense of the bargain he has made, Caiaphas offers the classic collaborationist argument: Fewer will die if we do our own killing.
Historically, fewer did die so long as the collaboration lasted. When a religiously fueled popular uprising finally broke out in earnest a few decades later, the Romans did just what Caiaphas here predicts they will do. Though it took them, significantly, fifty years to fully defeat the Jews, the defeat, when it finally came, was close to absolute. After the elimination of the last military messiah, with the Temple long since razed, the Romans gave Jerusalem a new Latin name, Aelia Capitolina, and made it a capital offense for any Jew to set foot in the place. Caiaphas and his colleagues have reason to fear that, given the highly political religious tradition of their nation, religious enthusiasm, once roused, will inevitably, and fatally, take a political turn. They are defending the nation against a danger that Jesus does not actually pose, but their assumption about the kind of enthusiasm he is generating is more than plausible.
And their misunderstanding, of course, becomes a part of the Gospel plot. Within that plot, the protagonist fully intends to be misunderstood. Official misunderstanding of him both moves the action along and functions as commentary on it in the manner of a chorus commenting on the action in a Greek tragedy. John characterizes Caiaphas as a prophet in spite of himself when he says that it is better that one man die than that the entire nation perish. “He did not say this on his own,” John says. “He was [unwittingly] prophesying that Jesus was to die for the nation—and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the scattered children of God” (John 11:51–52). God is the only real agent here. Caiaphas is functioning as God’s tool, just as Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon did when he defeated Judea and destroyed the Jerusalem Temple. The difference is that, this time, it is God in person upon whom the defeat will be inflicted; it is the temple of his body, rather than the Temple of Solomon, that will be destroyed.
The raising of Lazarus creates a sensation, just as the leaders have predicted; and when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem for Passover, he is hailed as a king in cries that quote a Psalm and a prophecy (see passages in italics below). On this occasion, rather than deliver another ironic speech, Jesus engages in an ironic pantomime:
The next day the huge crowd of people who had come up for the [Passover] festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took branches of palm and went out to receive him, shouting:
Hosanna!
Blessed in the name of the Lord is he who comes [Ps. 118:25–26]:
the king of Israel!
Jesus found a young donkey and mounted it—as scripture says:
Do not be afraid, O daughter of Zion.
Behold, your king approaches,
riding on the foal of a donkey [Zech. 9:9].
(John 12:12–15)
The palm was a familiar symbol of victory, long used as such by Jewish royalists. The Greek word hosanna, in the verses quoted from the Psalm, reproduces a Hebrew or Aramaic imperative (the literal meaning is “Save!”) in a special form associated with entreaties directed toward God or toward a king. The phrase “the king of Israel” does not occur in the Psalm but is added by the inflamed crowd, which is politicizing Jesus’ miracle just as Caiaphas and his party were sure it would.
Jesus himself, by arriving on a young donkey, contributes to this politicization, for his action mimes an image used by the prophet Zechariah in a passage predicting the victory of Israel over Greece.
Since Greek was the common language of the eastern half of the Roman empire, Jews in Palestine had the habit of referring to everyone who belonged to the common Greco-Roman culture as Greek. Whether as actual Greeks, cultural Greeks, or Greek-speaking Romans, these were the people who had been the principal enemy of Israel for two centuries. But the passage to which Jesus alludes has more in it than a promise of victory:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on an ass,
on a colt the foal of an ass.
“I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem”;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall command peace to the nations;
his dominion shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River [Euphrates] to the ends of the earth.
“As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your captives free from the waterless pit.
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.
For I have bent Judah as my bow;
I have made Ephraim its arrow.
I will brandish your sons, O Zion,
over your sons, O Greece,
and wield you like a warrior’s sword.”
(RSV with modifications; Zech. 9:9–13)
When Assyria took Israel and Babylonia destroyed Jerusalem, God referred to them as the weapons that he was brandishing against his chosen people. Since then, Israel’s “prisoners of hope” have never abandoned the dream of a day to come when Israel would once again be the weapon that the Lord would brandish against her oppressor as he had done at the Exodus from Egypt. When the Nazarene who has just demonstrated his power over life and death arrives in Jerusalem triumphant and riding on the foal of an ass, this is the long-deferred hope that is summoned up. In the excitement, no one is slowed by the thought that he comes “humble” or that what he promises may be to “cut off … the war horse from Jerusalem” and “impose peace upon the nations” rather than war. Even less does anyone look for a hidden meaning in “the blood of my covenant with you.”
Must they? Why should they? One may read a citation like this one ironically, as a pacifist, subverting its usual meaning, but one may just as easily countersubvert the subversion and read the verse, less ironically, as a militarist. In any event, one must “get” any ironic reading the way one “gets” a joke. Whence the
explanatory comment in the text: “At first his disciples did not understand these things, but later, after Jesus had been glorified, they remembered that what had been written about him was what had then happened to him” (John 12:16). As for the Greeks, against whom Judah was to be the bow and Ephraim (Samaria) the arrow:
Among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They approached Philip, who came from Bethsaida [a Greek-speaking town] in Galilee, and said, “Sir, we should like to see Jesus.” Philip went to tell Andrew, and Andrew and Philip together went on to tell Jesus. Jesus answered:
Now is the hour
for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Truly I tell you:
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains but a single grain.
Yet if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.
Whoever loves his life will lose it.
Whoever hates his life in this world
will keep it for eternal life.…
Now my soul is troubled.
What shall I say:
“Father, save me from this hour”?
No, for this is the very reason why I have come to this hour.
Father, glorify your name!
Then came a voice from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will again glorify it.”
The bystanders, hearing it, said it was thunder, though some said, “It was an angel speaking to him.” Jesus said in answer,
It was not for my sake but for yours
that this voice came.
Now is sentence rendered on this world.
Now will the Prince of This World be driven out.