bread and exhorting Peter in turn to “feed” others (“lambs” and “sheep”) is Jesus’ definitive showing of himself. Breaking bread is his signature, and John rightfully insists that in this lies the recognition scene (21:12), despite the miracle that the disciples had just witnessed of Jesus multiplying the fish in their net (a variation on the earlier miracle with the 5000). The meal is wonderfully self-contained, then, begging the very question that John knows it raises. Because swirling around the scene is the identity of Jesus being bread. Separated from breaking bread but integral to the scene, his being bread remains present in the air like an electric field. John chooses suspension without demanding resolution, just as he never demands closure of language itself. Bread & . . . ? Bread & fish? Hardly. John leaves the symmetry broken, the doors of meaning wide open, allowing other voices to drift through.
Voices
“Mary,” Jesus says, and she turns and says “Rabboni,” which as John explains means “Master” (20:16). Until he utters her name, Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. It is not the sight of Jesus, but the sound of his voice that identifies him. A recognition scene so delicious (nothing like it until Shakespeare) that the hairs lift on the back of my neck.
John isolates and orchestrates the tender drama beautifully. He has the men leave Mary who then converses with angels in the place where Jesus was buried, which sets up her mistaking Jesus for the gardener. Mary is distraught, imagining angels who perhaps can offer hope in the face of despair (their highest function), and thus doesn’t recognize Jesus whom she has known for years.
The climax in Jesus’ speaking her name carries great power. We know the immediate recognition that comes with the sound of a person’s voice, the tone more powerful than the sight when, for example, we’re so surprised at the presence before our very eyes of a person we did not expect to see that we don’t see them but instantly know them by their voice.
From the outset of his book John makes this signature power of the voice clear. John the Baptist “stands and hears” Jesus, not seeing him so much as “rejoicing” in his voice (3:29). The emphasis is on Jesus speaking and his audience hearing, not on their visually recognizing him. His essential being is in his voice.
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We are our voice. More than our physical features or characteristic gestures we are most essentially individuals in our voice—sighs, words, laughter—our self made public. The voice carries the inside over to the outside. It is the revelation of the inner body. Conversely, moving from flesh to voice is to push more deeply into the body, probe further, approach the life itself. For the power of the speaking voice is in its embodiment of life.
The grand opening of John’s book is a hymn to this power. “In the beginning was the Speaking, and the Speaking was with God, and the Speaking was God.” John’s logos, commonly translated “Word,” is not the word on the page but the word spoken. This is the source of power throughout John’s book.
Now hear this voice, John’s hymn of invocation to the word uttered, the origin of what is:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him;
and outside him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shines in darkness;
and the darkness comprehended it not (1:1–5).
The spectacular conceit of a poet: the whole world created from the word. And who is not moved by John’s grand speaking in this cosmic opening. We are mesmerized by his repetition of the “Word” and stirred by his exalted correspondences: word = life, word = light. The word so potent it baffles the dark. John announces the light/darkness theme in a sublimely sweeping way, at the same time his voice carries something of a syllogistic tone. We see him making mythic philosophy and philosophic myth, no mean feat. Then rather abruptly: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (1:6).
What a contrast to the cosmic opening—this single declarative. The rhythmic waves of John’s voice crash on the shore and run all the way up the beach of our world, the last bit of foam falling, finally spent at the feet of this man (and us).
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light,
that all men through him might believe.
He was not that Light,
but was sent to bear witness of that Light (1:7–8)
The disclaimer is perfect. The logician’s voice resumes—O that syllogistic rag. John’s eating his cosmic cake and having it too. You can tell, John’s a debater. “That was the true Light, which lights every man that comes into the world” (1:9).
Back to the chant on “light,” we’re completely taken by John’s ability to be lyrical and ratiocinative at the same time.
He was in the world,
and the world was made by him,
and the world knew him not (1:10).
Entranced by repetition, John loves the emotional build of this chant. Rooted in the formal rhythm of ritual, it is intensified by John’s limiting himself in vocabulary. His characteristic style, taken from and given to Jesus, isolates a word and then names it out loud, varying the context but pronouncing it again and again. He’s obsessed with certain words (not unlike most poets) as if they’re talismans possessing magical power.
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As the essence of life itself, the voice has magical power against death. It is the “loud voice” (11:43) of Jesus, not his touch or gesture, that brings Lazarus back from the dead. John heightens the dramatic effect of this act of speech by having Jesus pause, just before calling out to Lazarus, and interrupt the proceedings to direct words to his Father (11:41–42). John is well aware of his artful move, establishing permission for the use of dramatic technique by pointing out Jesus’ own admission that he himself used the scene to achieve a specific effect (11:42). Add suspense to magic, and the word, which we remember exists from the beginning of time, takes on immense power for life. The word is merely uttered and nature responds.
Power to triumph over death is in this voice alone. It is not in the seeing with one’s own eyes or in the doing, but in the hearing that truth is apprehended. Jesus asserts that in the voice the future collapses into the present. The ear is the arena of an eternal present tense, where voices of the past and future are one in the present, and hence “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live” (5:25). No action is necessary. The voice is all.
Naming in itself has an uncanny power. Lazarus comes forth at the loud utterance of his name; Mary comes into awareness at the calm enunciation of hers.
We are drawn by the one who names. Because naming out loud invokes the essential interior life, our real being is awakened. The flip side of this drawing out, however, is its pressing down. This explains why Jesus is fond of “sheep” as a metaphor for his followers, who respond when he calls them by “name” (10:3) just as sheep know the shepherd’s voice. The one
