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Jesus’ dramatic pause to speak to his Father before raising Lazarus reveals what we’ve known all along, that Jesus hears voices in his head continually. Like his disciples, he too is a listener. He responds to the Father who speaks to him. At one point the people also hear this voice, interpreting it as either “thunder” or an angel’s voice (12:29). Apparently a different angel than the one Mary conversed with.
The voice in Jesus’ head becomes audible to those who accept his new vocabulary. As he states unequivocally to Pilate, “Every one that is of the truth hears my voice” (18:37). Hearing this voice of his “truth” is to embrace a new vision of real life, which values things differently—the law (woman taken in adultery), as well as social (Samaritan woman) and gender divisions (Mary boldly anointing Jesus with perfume), the political order itself.
John gives us many of the voices that Jesus hears. They are various, lucid simplicity as well as sublime nonsense, at times teasing or sermonizing, abrupt or tender, but always arresting.
Jesus often begins in the most disarmingly simple way: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (15:1), for example, then shifts to the preacher’s voice. Jesus launches into a repetitious (with his numbing chant on “father”), less than joyous sermon, which irony we smile at because he’s just said he won’t be talking much any more (14:30). As his monologue spirals heavenward it becomes increasingly convoluted:
I am the vine, you are the branches: He that abides in me, and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit; so shall you be my disciples (15:5–8).
At the same time, its centrifugal force whirls him away from the incipient parable into another analogy. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you: continue you in my love. If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love; just as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That you love one another, as I have loved you” (15:9–12). What a contrast in context to the earlier admonition to “love one another” (13:34). Here it’s a belaboring, almost hectoring atmosphere. Jesus’ primer-like, patronizing method of proceeding exacerbates this. In the earlier context the admonition flows naturally from the warmth of his speech.
As a result, Jesus’ conclusion here that he speaks so their “joy might be full,” sounds somewhat hollow. Perhaps Jesus is getting impatient as his determination to give himself up to martyrdom becomes certain. He has, after all, just displayed a rather frayed frame of mind in losing patience with Philip (14:9).
Yet responding directly to the continual voice in his head, Jesus “lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee’” (17:1). Its energy in check, he modulates his voice into exquisite tenderness.
This direct address of his Father is also intended to be overheard by the disciples. With this comes a shift to a more subdued tone, a mix of humility and tenderness.
And now, O Father, . . . I have manifested your name unto the men which you gave me out of the world: yours they were, and you gave them me; and they have kept your word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever you have given me are of you. For I have given unto them the words which you gave me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from you, and they have believed that you did send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for those who you have given me; for they are yours. . . . (17:5–9)
John has his readers listen along with the disciples to Jesus’ comforting supplication with its lulling, cycling rhythms and repeated words on their behalf that they might have “joy fulfilled” and, building to a climax, truth and finally glory.
The disciples must have thrilled to hear Jesus’ supplication, an incantation in their honor wishing for them the radiance of Jesus himself (and John’s readers wishing right along with them). Undoubtedly they failed as usual to understand what Jesus was saying, but they certainly understood the import of Jesus’ gesture of speech on their behalf. They know a wish fulfillment when they hear one.
And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to you. Holy Father, keep through your own name those whom you have given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in your name: those that you gave me I have kept, and none of them is lost. . . . And now come I to you; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world (17:11–14).
Having kept the “word” and in the “name” been kept, the disciples are verified as new creatures. They possess the new life of Jesus along with the “joy” that comes with it.
But this circling voice of Jesus, his reflective prayer culminating in its “world” chant, reminds us of John’s voice at the opening of the book. Jesus is given a greater range of tone, and after leaving this soliloquy John rides his narrative arrow, but he has appropriated Jesus’ voice. The poet has taken into himself the life of his subject, breathed in the voice of power.
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John makes our dependence on voice increasingly evident as his book progresses. The sheer quantity of Jesus’ words, repeating and swirling around us, increases toward the climax of the book; the Word (in the beginning) becomes words even as words become the Word (in the end on the cross). John bets the world on the word. “I have been saving up my hope in language,” concludes the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez at the end of his life, “in a spoken name, a written name.” Like the Spanish poet, John has done the same, creating in language the figure of Jesus who creates the world by naming anew. With Jiménez, John could truly say that he has “given a name to everything.”
The voice that names enables us to imagine the world differently. It confers or withdraws status. The humble are elevated; the exalted are humbled. Those formerly without power are given power, and vice versa. It is the giving or taking away of a blessing, which in the Jewish scriptures granted life itself. The blessing conferred by naming had uncanny, powerful magic. One could die without it. With it we are made new. Re-imagining the woman taken in adultery as “human” instead of “criminal,” we have become new people.
But the power of naming is two-edged. Accepting Jesus’ new vocabulary, which he intends to be our only vocabulary because it is the only truth, it becomes possible to name those who do not hear Jesus’ voice the “damned.” Once we internalize this category and place those people in it, we can legitimately act against them. For they are not human, being criminals, which excuses even murder. The power to name is the power to remake the world in your own image for good or evil.
John is drawn to Jesus because Jesus possesses this imaginative power of naming, the power to define what is. Jesus knows that whoever has the power to name the world has the power to change it. This is so because, as William Blake says, “Nature has no Outline, but Imagination has.”
John’s book is an extended naming of a re-imagined world, a new vision. As a writer, John taps into this power to draw new lines and make a new world. And he is supremely conscious of this project, as he boldly parallels the beginning of the world itself—“And God said, let there be, . . .”—in the beginning of his book. A book celebrating the voice as John invokes the muse of
