Jesus of Nazareth

by Joseph Ratzinger

  We began this book with Moses' prophecy: "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren--him you shall heed" (Deut 18:15). We saw that the Book of Deuteronomy, which contains this prophecy, ends with the observation: "and there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face" (Deut 34:10). Until that hour, the great promise had remained unfulfilled. Now He is here, the one who is truly close to the Father's heart, the only one who has seen him, who sees him and who speaks out of this seeing--the one of whom it is therefore fittingly said: "him you shall heed" (Mk 9:7; Deut 18:15). The promise to Moses is fulfilled superabundantly, in the overflowingly lavish way in which God is accustomed to bestow his gifts. The One who has come is more than Moses, more than a prophet. He is the Son. And that is why grace and truth now come to light, not in order to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it.

  The second observation concerns the liturgical character of John's Gospel. It has a rhythm dictated by Israel's calendar of religious festivals. The major feasts of the People of God articulate the inner structure of Jesus' path and at the same time display the foundation on which the edifice of his message rises.

  Right at the beginning of Jesus' activity we read of the "Passover of the Jews," which suggests the motif of the true Temple, and thus of the Cross and Resurrection (cf. Jn 2:13-25). The healing of the paralytic, which occasions Jesus' first major public discourse in Jerusalem, is once again connected with a "feast of the Jews" (Jn 5:1)--probably the "Feast of Weeks," Pentecost. The multiplication of the loaves and its interpretation in the "bread of life" discourse, which is the great eucharistic discourse in John's Gospel, occur in the context of Passover (cf. Jn 6:4). Jesus' next major discourse, where he promises "rivers of living water" (Jn 7:38f.), is set at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles. Finally, we meet Jesus again in Jerusalem in wintertime at the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple (Hanukkah) (cf. Jn 10:22). Jesus' path is brought to completion during his last Passover (cf. Jn 12:1), when he himself becomes the true Paschal Lamb who pours out his blood on the Cross. We shall see, moreover, that Jesus' high-priestly prayer, which contains a subtle eucharistic theology in the form of a theology of his sacrifice on the Cross, is built up entirely in terms of the theological content of the Feast of the Atonement. This fundamentally important feast of Israel thus also feeds crucially into the crafting of Jesus' words and works. In the next chapter, furthermore, we shall see that the event of Jesus' Transfiguration recounted by the Synoptics is set in the framework of the Feast of the Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles and therefore reflects the same theological background. Only if we constantly keep in mind the liturgical context of Jesus' discourses, indeed of the whole structure of John's Gospel, will we be able to understand its vitality and depth.

  All Jewish festivals, as we shall see below in greater detail, have a triple basis. The initial stratum is composed of feasts of nature religion, which connect with creation and with man's search for God through creation; this then develops into feasts of remembrance, of the recollection and making-present of God's saving deeds; finally, remembering increasingly takes on the form of hope for the coming definitive saving deed that is still awaited. Clearly, then, Jesus' discourses in John's Gospel are not disputes occasioned by metaphysical questions, but they contain the whole dynamic of salvation history and, at the same time, they are rooted in creation. They are ultimately pointers to the One who can simply say of himself: "I am." It is evident that Jesus' discourses direct us toward worship and in this sense toward "sacrament," at the same time embracing the questioning and seeking of all peoples.

  After these introductory considerations, it is time to take a somewhat closer look at some of the principal images that we find in the Fourth Gospel.

  THE PRINCIPAL JOHANNINE IMAGES

  Water

  Water is the primordial element of life and is therefore also one of the primordial symbols of humanity. It appears to man in various forms and hence with various meanings.

  The first form is the spring, water that bursts forth fresh from the womb of the earth. The spring is origin, beginning, in its as yet unclouded and unspent purity. The spring thus figures as a truly creative element, as well as being a symbol of fruitfulness, of maternity.

  A second form is flowing water. The great rivers--the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris--are the major, seemingly almost godlike sources of life in the vast lands surrounding Israel. In Israel it is the Jordan River that bestows life on the land. In connection with Jesus' Baptism, though, we saw that river symbolism shows another side as well: A river is deep, and so embodies danger; descent into the deep can therefore signify descent into death, just as ascent from it can signify rebirth.

  The final form is the sea. It is a power that evokes admiration; its majesty calls forth amazement. Above all, though, it is feared in its guise as the counterpart to the earth, the domain of human life. The Creator has assigned the sea its limits, which it may not transgress: It is not permitted to swallow up the earth. The crossing of the Red Sea was above all a symbol of salvation for Israel, but of course it also points to the danger that proved to be the destiny of the Egyptians. If Christians consider the crossing of the Red Sea as a prefiguring of Baptism, there in the immediate foreground is the symbolism of death: It becomes an image of the mystery of the Cross. In order to be reborn, man must first enter with Christ into the "Red Sea," plunge with him down into death, in order thus to attain new life with the risen Lord.

  But let us now turn from these general remarks about water symbolism in religious history to the Gospel of John. Water symbolism pervades the Gospel from beginning to end. We meet it for the first time in Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus in chapter 3. In order to be able to enter the Kingdom of God, man must be made new, he must become another person--he must be born again of water and the Spirit (cf. Jn 3:5). What does this mean?

  Baptism, the gateway into communion with Christ, is being interpreted for us here as rebirth. This rebirth--by analogy with natural birth from the begetting of the man and the conception of the woman--involves a double principle: God's spirit and "water, the 'universal mother' of natural life--which grace raises up in the sacrament to be a sister-image of the virginal Theotokos" (Rech, Inbild, II, p. 303).

  Rebirth--to put it another way--involves the creative power of God's Spirit, but it also requires the sacrament of the maternal womb of the receiving and welcoming Church. Photina Rech cites Tertullian: Never was Christ without water (Tertullian, De baptismo, IX, 4). She then gives this somewhat enigmatic saying of the early Church writer its correct interpretation: "Christ never was, and never is, without the Ekklesia" (Rech, Inbild, II, p. 304). Spirit and water, heaven and earth, Christ and the Church, belong together. And that is how "rebirth" happens. In the sacrament, water stands for the maternal earth, the holy Church, which welcomes creation into herself and stands in place of it.

  Immediately after the conversation with Nicodemus, we meet Jesus at Jacob's well in chapter 4. The Lord promises the Samaritan woman water that becomes in the one who drinks it a source springing up into eternal life (cf. Jn 4:14), so that whoever drinks it will never be thirsty again. In this scene, the symbolism of the well is associated with Israel's salvation history. Earlier, at the calling of Nathanael, Jesus had already revealed himself as the new and greater Jacob. In a nocturnal vision Jacob had seen the angels of God ascending and descending above the stone he was using for a pillow. Jesus prophesies to Nathanael that his disciples will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending above him (cf. Jn 1:51). Here, at Jacob's well, we encounter Jacob as the great patriarch who by means of this well had provided water, the basic element of life. But there is a greater thirst in man--it extends beyond the water from the well, because it seeks a life that reaches out beyond the biological sphere.

  We will come across this same inner tension in man once more when we come to the section on bread. Moses gave manna, bread from
heaven. But it was still just earthly "bread." The manna is a promise: The new Moses is also expected to give bread. Once again, however, something greater than manna has to be given. Once again we see man reaching out into the infinite, toward another "bread" that will truly be "bread from heaven."

  The promise of new water and the promise of new bread thus mirror each other. They both reflect the other dimension of life, for which man can only yearn. John distinguishes between bios and zoe--between biological life (bios) and the fullness of life (zoe) that is itself a source and so is not subject to the dying and becoming that mark the whole of creation. In the conversation with the Samaritan woman, then, water once again--though now in a different way--functions as the symbol of the Pneuma, the real life-force, which quenches man's deeper thirst and gives him plenitude of life, for which he is waiting without knowing it.

  In the next chapter, chapter 5, water appears more or less in passing. It makes its appearance in the story of the man who has lain sick for thirty-eight years. He hopes to be healed by wading into the pool of Bethzatha, but there is no one to help him into the water. Jesus heals the man by his supreme authority; he accomplishes for the sick man the very thing the man had hoped to receive from the healing water. In chapter 7, which, according to a convincing hypothesis of modern exegesis, in all likelihood originally followed directly after chapter 5, we find Jesus attending the Feast of Tabernacles, which involves a solemn ritual of water libation. We will have to treat this in detail presently.

  We come across water symbolism again in chapter 9, where Jesus heals the man born blind. The process of healing involves the sick man, on Jesus' instructions, washing in the Pool of Siloam. In this way he obtains his sight. "Siloam means, being translated: the One Sent" (Jn 9:7), as the Evangelist notes for the reader who knows no Hebrew. But this is more than a philological observation. It is a way of identifying the real cause of the miracle. For "the One Sent" is Jesus. When all is said and done, Jesus is the one through whom and in whom the blind man is cleansed so that he can gain his sight. The whole chapter turns out to be an interpretation of Baptism, which enables us to see. Christ is the giver of light, and he opens our eyes through the mediation of the sacrament.

  Water appears with a similar, yet further shade of meaning in chapter 13--at the hour of the Last Supper--in connection with the washing of the feet. Jesus gets up from the table, takes off his upper garment, girds himself with a linen cloth, pours water into a bowl, and begins to wash the feet of the disciples (cf. Jn 13:4f.). The humility of Jesus, in making himself his followers' slave, is the purifying foot washing that renders us fit to take our places at God's table.

  Finally, water appears before us again with a mysterious grandeur at the end of the Passion. Since Jesus is dead, his bones are not broken (Jn 19:31), but one of the soldiers "pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water" (Jn 19:34). There is no doubt that John means to refer here to the two main sacraments of the Church--Baptism and the Eucharist--which spring forth from Jesus' opened heart and thus give birth to the Church from his side.

  Now, John later goes back to the motif of blood and water in his First Letter and there gives it a new twist: "This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.... There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three are one" (1 Jn 5:6-8). Here John very obviously gives the motif a polemical turn against a form of Christianity that acknowledges Jesus' Baptism as a saving event but does not acknowledge his death on the Cross in the same way. He is responding to a form of Christianity that, so to speak, wants only the word, but not flesh and blood. Jesus' body and his death ultimately play no role. So all that is left of Christianity is mere "water"--without Jesus' bodiliness the word loses its power. Christianity becomes mere doctrine, mere moralism, an intellectual affair, but it lacks any flesh and blood. The redemptive character of Jesus' blood is no longer accepted. It disturbs the intellectual harmony.

  Who could fail to recognize here certain temptations threatening Christianity in our own times? Water and blood belong together; Incarnation and Cross, Baptism, word, and sacrament are inseparable from one another. Not only that, but the Pneuma is needed to complete this triple testimony. Schnackenburg rightly points out that what is intended here is "the witness of the Spirit in the church and through the church, as in John 15:26, 16:10"( Johannine Epistles, p. 234).

  Let us turn now to Jesus' words of revelation in the context of the Feast of Tabernacles that John transmits to us at 7:37-39. "On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, 'If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, "Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water." '" In the background is the ritual of the feast, which prescribed that participants should draw water from the spring at Siloam in order to offer a water libation in the Temple on each of the seven days of the feast. On the seventh day, the priests processed seven times around the altar holding a golden water vessel before ritually pouring out its contents. These water rituals are in the first place indications of the origin of the feast in the nature religions: The feast began as an invocatory petition for rain, which was so vitally necessary in a land chronically threatened by drought. But the ritual was then transformed into a remembrance of a piece of salvation history, of the water from the rock that, in spite of all their doubts and fears, God gave the Jews as they wandered in the desert (cf. Num 20:1-13).

  Finally, the gift of water from the rock increasingly became a motif of messianic hope. Moses had given Israel bread from heaven and water from the rock as the people wandered in the desert. On this pattern, the new Moses, the Messiah, was expected to give these two essential gifts of life as well. This messianic interpretation of the gift of water is reflected in Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians: "All ate the same pneumatic food and all drank the same pneumatic drink; for they drank from the pneumatic rock that went with them. But the rock was Christ" (1 Cor 10:3f.).

  In the words that Jesus speaks during the water ritual, he responds to this hope: He is the new Moses. He himself is the life-giving rock. Just as in the bread discourse he reveals himself as the true bread that comes from heaven, he shows himself here--just as he had done with the Samaritan woman--as the living water that is the goal of man's deeper thirst, the thirst for life, for "life in abundance" (Jn 10:10): This life is no longer conditioned by need that must constantly be satisfied, but it springs up from within, from deep inside itself. Jesus also answers the questions as to how one drinks this living water, how one gets to the well and draws from it, by saying, "He who believes in me..." Faith in Jesus is the way we drink the living water, the way we drink life that is no longer threatened by death.

  But now we must listen more carefully to the text. It continues: "As the Scripture has said, 'Out of his body shall flow rivers of living water'" (Jn 7:38). Out of whose body? Since the earliest times there have been two different answers to this question. The tradition started by Origen, which is associated with Alexandria, though the great Latin Fathers Jerome and Augustine also subscribe to it, reads the text thus: "He who believes...out of his body..." The believer himself becomes a spring, an oasis out of which bubbles up fresh, uncontaminated water, the life-giving power of the Creator Spirit. Alongside this tradition there is another, albeit much less widespread, from Asia Minor, which is closer to John in its origins. It is documented by Justin (d. 165), Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Cyprian, and Ephraim of Syria. It punctuates the text differently: "He who thirsts, let him come to me, and let him who believes in me drink it. As the Scripture says: out of his body rivers will flow." "His body" is now applied to Christ: He is the source, the living rock, from which the new water comes.

  From the purely linguistic point of view, the first interpretation is more convincing. It has accordingly been adopted by the majority of modern exegetes--along with the great Church Fathers. In terms of the content, t
hough, there is more to be said for the second, "Asia Minor" interpretation, to which Schnackenburg, for example, subscribes, though it need not be considered to exclude the "Alexandrian" reading. An important key to the interpretation of this passage lies in the phrase "as the Scripture says." Jesus attaches great importance to being in continuity with the Scripture, in continuity with God's history with men. The whole Gospel of John, as well as the Synoptic Gospels and the entirety of the New Testament writings, justify faith in Jesus by showing that all the currents of Scripture come together in him, that he is the focal point in terms of which the overall coherence of Scripture comes to light--everything is waiting for him, everything is moving toward him.

  But where does Scripture speak of this living spring? John is obviously not thinking of any one particular passage, but precisely of "the Scripture," of a vision that runs through its texts. We have just come across one of the principal clues: The story of the water issuing from the rock, a story that became an image of hope in Israel. Ezekiel 47:1-12 furnishes us with the second major clue, the vision of the new Temple: "And behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the Temple toward the east" (Ezek 47:1). A good fifty years later Zechariah returned to this image: "On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness" (Zech 13:1), "On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem" (Zech 14:8). The final chapter of the Bible reinterprets these images and at the same time manifests their full greatness for the first time: "Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb" (Rev 22:1).