all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.’”
Jesus the provocateur is hard to take. But by this he teaches a new language of sacrifice that allows both his disciples and enemies to reconcile within life his stubborn insistence on the body of death, which is at the heart of Jesus’ character.
We can’t get around this, and John shows us the way through. He presents Jesus as systematically carrying out a program to inculcate a new vocabulary of sacrifice, subverting the traditional term. His aim is to bring the Jews into a new understanding, and so become new people—believers. At the same time, Jesus wishes to bring his followers into a new understanding of the body. He must convince them that his body can be eaten but not consumed. The new body of the believer can be sustained by the one Jesus, not as a substitute but as the very body itself. In short, the believer can eat the body of Jesus and have it too.
John accomplishes this by expanding Jesus’ sacrificial role to include the scapegoat of Jewish tradition (Lev 16:8). The scapegoat is an appropriately ambiguous figure, for he disappears, dying to the community, yet lives in exile. Moreover, John employs the clever strategy of having the high priest Caiaphas introduce the notion of the scapegoat. He says to the Jews, “You know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (11:49–50). We savor the irony that the Jews themselves make Jesus’ identity as sacrifice explicit, articulating what Jesus’ disciples failed to see, who continue their efforts to prevent Jesus from being stoned. Nonetheless, Jesus’ purpose and the Jews’ intent finally converge on the trajectory of death (11:53).
The Jews and his disciples may not all have accepted Jesus’ new vocabulary, assimilating his redefinition of sacrifice, but Jesus manages to get them to support him with action. We can only marvel at his powers of manipulation, just as we admire John the writer’s powers in leading us to accept the new terms of sacrifice.
As scapegoat Jesus can have it both ways, being sacrifice and survivor, lamb and shepherd. At the beginning Jesus is the powerless lamb; in the end it is his listeners who become helpless sheep as he becomes the shepherd. They accept, that is, his language and concomitant power. Calling his followers “sheep” (10:11) emphasizes his authoritative role. But, paradoxically, this is why they come to accept him as a lamb, a new kind of sacrifice, a literal self-sacrifice. The sacrifice of the lamb is no longer the promise of an action as in Passover (Exod 12:13) but the act itself.
As shepherd Jesus is both a political subject within the community and not. He is both the quick (to the new community) and the dead (to a past community). John is no doubt familiar with the long tradition of the Greek phrase “shepherd of the people,” which appears in the Iliad as the title for a king or feudal lord. Yet Jesus’ self-understanding, of course, goes beyond the political. Jesus can say with Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, “I never kept sheep,” but “My soul is like a shepherd.” More important, Jesus’ language makes this private conviction publicly compelling.
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Jesus in his parable of the sheepfold (10:1–4) continues his redefinition of sacrifice, wresting it from the purely traditional Jewish context. He knows the power of figurative language, which he admits to using (16:25), including puns (e.g., “wind,” 3:8) and parables, to create new language from old. John’s abrupt transition from urban to pastoral with this move to the parable of the shepherd is a shock, a way of calling our attention to the project of redefinition. And he is keenly aware of his role in this, self-consciously interpreting (2:21) and selecting (20:30). The shock of the change in imagery reinforces the shock in change of vocabulary, the redefining and reinterpreting that is so important to Jesus.
Yet this doesn’t wholly explain our uneasiness. The strangeness of Jesus’ shepherd/sheep imagery goes beyond John’s shift here to the metaphoric, where he had been resolutely literal with the lamb. The lamb begins as a figure of speech and ends as the literal, slaughtered body.
Jesus invites us at first in his parable to see literal sheep but ultimately turns them into metaphor. Shepherd and sheep lie uneasily in John’s book. Mainly taking place in the city, the book does not readily admit them. Because of this his imagery seems almost nostalgic. True to his bent, he transforms the innocence of the lamb into the experience of blood. But the sheep restore some of their innocence, associations of a past place and future time. They retain their aura of innocence by remaining a figure of speech.
In the countryside Jesus is the shepherd. In the city he is the lamb destined for slaughter. The pastoral seems to call the urban into question. Jesus’ journeying to the country or retreating to a mountain is movement toward life. Throughout the book Jesus oscillates between the country and the city, between the periphery and the center. John exploits this tension by subtly informing us that in the center, in the city is death. When Jesus retreats to the periphery, he is holding death off. The closer to the city, the closer to a celebration and feast, the closer Jesus is to becoming himself the feast.
John expands the pastoral arena of sacrifice, however, deepening its significance. Jesus’ metaphor of the seed dramatically shifts our new vocabulary of sacrifice from the animal to the vegetable world, as if ultimately rooting it in the rich tradition of fertility religions, which the prophets like Isaiah abhorred (Isa. 17:8–11). More important, the parable intensifies while completing Jesus’ program of redefining sacrifice: “And Jesus answered them, saying, the hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, Verily, I say unto you, unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it die, it brings forth much fruit. He that loves his life shall lose it; and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (12:23–25).
The central paradox—lose one’s life in order to save it—is impossible. This new vocabulary of sacrifice is frighteningly literal. We instinctively turn away.
But John insists. He puts these words at the center of his book, just as they are at the center of Jesus’ life. Their great aphoristic force resounds down through the centuries. Yet they’re also repellent with overtones of hatred for the world. Do they allow room for Jesus’ love of wine at Cana? The sensuous caress of Mary’s hair brushing his feet? Friendship for Martha and Lazarus that moves him to tears? Or the spirited even joyous dialog with friends like Peter, and Zen exchange with strangers like Nicodemus? Jesus loves the world one moment and despises it the next. We are returned to the paradox of the slaughtered lamb.
The notion of sacrifice now extends beyond the Jews. Jesus subverts their religious understanding of sacrifice and expands it to a grain of wheat, encompassing the whole living world. This constitutes a new vocabulary. It is no longer limited to a specific religious context, nor can we take refuge in the lamb or the seed as metaphor. And uneasiness with the pastoral as a protective space accompanies this, dispelling any whiff of nostalgia. The program of redefinition is radical. John keeps returning us to the literal, sacrificial body. And he moves relentlessly forward, increasing the pressure on his audience’s old understanding of life, as he redefines bread.
Bread &
Our desire is appeased only by feeding on Thee, bread of immortality.
—Miguel de Unamuno
The seed in Jesus’ metaphor, sacrificed to the mill and ground up, is transformed into bread. The fruit of the vine, crushed, becomes wine. Bread and wine presume sacrifice, but more than this they come into being by metamorphosis. The vegetable is literally transformed to animal.
Bread & wine were married long before John wrote his book. They are a perfect symmetry, an ancient expression for eating and drinking. Ever since, as in the verses of Omar Kayyam’s Rubaiyat or in the space of Picasso’s still lifes, their marriage has been reaffirmed. Bread & wine have become
