of John’s book but the word made actual flesh. His collapsing the metaphoric into the literal is compelling by its very strangeness.
The scene calls the utility of language into question, then, exploding our tacit agreement about what is literal and what figurative. Witnessing Thomas’ encounter with Jesus, we are repelled and fascinated not only by its insistent physicality but by language bent beyond its breaking point. Thomas’ act at Jesus’ invitation goes beyond belief and disbelief, beyond language itself. For in the end is the body.
Body
1. Perhaps Thomas is an extremist of the senses. Certainly his experiment is radical. Yet Jesus invites it.
2. Even reeling from the scene, we can’t avoid the conviction that Thomas’ act supports Jesus’ larger program perfectly. Not one given to theological abstraction here but centered in the physical body. Jesus declares boldly and unequivocally: “He that eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, dwells in me, and I in him” (6:56).
3. No punches pulled. Jesus insists on the literal, however much we squirm and want to retreat into the metaphoric.
4. Just as he invited Thomas to touch him, to sink his finger in a bloody wound, he invites us to eat. A radical but not surprising request, for eating is the extreme of touch.
5. What space is to us, the body is to John. The wide open spaces of America have always been the dwelling place of hope and freedom. For John their dwelling place must be the body. Everlasting life raises the stakes.
6. John wants not merely freedom for the body but freedom of the body. Not a body transformed by a place, but a transformed body subject no longer to the locus of mortality.
7. And this new body born from a new kind of womb is the center of John’s book. His real subject is the body not belief. Only in the body is freedom from death, the hope of immortality.
8. First and last this is the body of Jesus. Thomas’ experiment is pivotal because he acts out John’s desire to put on this new body.
9. John ultimately dispels the anxiety of death by exchanging his old mortal body for the new one that Jesus offers. And within this arena of transformation, John’s book unfolds.
10. John’s Jesus is obsessed with living abundantly, living beyond the life assumed to be our common lot. So great is his certainty that he is willing to sacrifice his present body for a promised body.
11. Thus John orchestrates a radical redefinition of the body. He begins with flesh.
12. John probes the double nature of flesh as sacrifice and sustenance, the lamb as well as bread, redefining them both. The body is also breath, and John redefines the wind that blows through our body carrying its chorus of voices.
13. He must effect a radical change in our accustomed vocabulary. The whole of John’s book is dedicated to precisely this change. From the outset he renames the essentials of everyday life—bread and water.
14. As Jesus gives them a new context and resonance, they gradually become for his listeners new things in the world. It is a brilliant strategy because as we come to use his new names, we internalize Jesus’ claims for “Eternal life.” Jesus’ dying into a living life, that is, exemplified in the transformation of his own body.
15. Material becomes immaterial becomes both and neither, an everlasting body that passes through solid walls but acquiesces to the touch of a human hand. Thus by the life he portrays, John redefines the body as immortal.
16. Jesus is not simply the model of this body, but is in himself the body shared, inviting his followers to partake of it (6:53). In the act of eating is achieved total identity with Jesus. By this John does not merely put on the body of Jesus, like Thomas, but becomes the body of Jesus.
17. Mortal/immortal, all is contained in this new body. In Jesus is identified the real. “The Word was made flesh” (1:14), encompassing the cosmos as well as all the words of John’s book.
18. Thus in the body of Jesus exists the entire world—animal (lamb), vegetable (bread), and mineral (temple). Jesus declares himself to be each of these. Self-generated and generating, he comprises all the elements of the world, including language itself, outside of whom nothing can be known.
19. All words are one word, and that one word is new. John’s book is the dictionary of these words that are the one Word.
20. The Jews assumed that “sacrifice” was their own word, but by becoming the sacrificial lamb Jesus makes it his own. The disciples and the people assumed that they understood the word “bread,” and the Samaritan woman the word “water,” but they all discover differently. Nicodemus knew the word “wind,” but Jesus renames it for him.
21. Going against the grain, Jesus’ stark invitation to eat his bread-flesh remains. John forces a redefinition that effects transformation. And thereby accomplishes his ultimate aim that the “you” in his fervent wish “that you might believe,” his listeners and readers, be transformed.
The Lamb
Painfully aware that his body is death in life, John desires a life-in-death body. This exalted conviction that one can possess life greater than life—“eternal life”—is the wellspring of his book. An encounter with Jesus is the source of this conviction, his book its lyrical expression. So powerful is his experience that he wants to inhabit the body of the man Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, who is alive to the degree that death is a presence.
Jesus is called the Lamb at the beginning of John’s book, but becomes a shepherd by the end (10:11). How can Jesus be both the shepherd and the sheep? Though he never refers to himself directly as the lamb, Jesus’ understanding of himself as a sacrificial lamb pervades John’s book. And he reinforces his role as shepherd at the end of the book by his injunction to Peter, “Feed my sheep.”
Jesus as sacrificial lamb is one of the book’s great ironies. His life given to the proclamation of eternal life is bent on death. To be obsessed with life is to be obsessed with death because Jesus’ life is incomplete without death. John sets this up in the beginning by having John the Baptist hail Jesus twice as the “Lamb” (1:29, 36). Clearly, John wants us to identify his body with the sacrificial lamb, haunting us throughout the book with Jesus’ words about his “hour” of death “not yet come.” To this end John deftly arranges events, counter to the other accounts of Jesus’ life, so that his sacrifice on the cross coincides with the Passover sacrifice of lambs in the Temple.
The metaphoric lamb at the beginning foreshadows this literal sacrifice on the cross. We are not in the end allowed the comfort of metaphor. Jesus becomes the real lamb slain. Always John insists on the reality of the body sacrificed, a stubborn insistence designed to make us uncomfortable.
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Because Jesus’ life can be completed only when his body is given to death, he provokes all around him in an effort to achieve death. At one point or another, every group he speaks to wants to stone him, and he must go by another path or into another country to escape. Even his brothers and disciples cannot dissuade him from inciting the powers that be to murder. Jesus has a knack for offending everyone.
More than Socrates even, Jesus is bent on death. His entire life in John’s account carries within it death, while Socrates in Plato’s account provokes one jury in a single climactic incident. Jesus is the master of extended provocation. We understand W. H. Auden’s visceral reaction:
