The purpose of the Gospel according to John is declared, not at the beginning, but at the end: 'in order that you may hold the faith that Jesus is Christ, the Son of God' (20:31).
To anyone (other than a Christian) who understood what was meant by the term "Christ" (Messiah, Anointed One), it would have come as a surprise that a book should have to be written for this purpose. "Christ", by definition, was a figure of power and glory. When he came, it would be impossible not to be aware of the fact. His destiny was to restore a kingdom of unprecedented splendour and justice to God's elect people among the Jews. Once his reign had begun, it would hardly be necessary to write a book to prove that he had come.
Nevertheless, Christians were not deterred from calling Jesus "Christ", even though the fact that the Christ had come was not recognized by the majority of the human race, not even by the Jews, who for centuries had been praying for his coming. This technical term of Jewish religion seemed the natural way to describe one who had actually been among them on earth, who was now at God's right hand in heaven, and who was the source of new life for his followers. They were able to find Old Testament texts which not only prophesied his glory but also implied a destiny of suffering and rejection; and the more they reflected on the life and teaching of Jesus, the better they began to understand the mysterious necessity that 'the Christ was bound to suffer' (Luke 24.26) and that his reign was to be, at least for the present, unrecognized by all but a few.
However, they soon came to realize that Jesus was more than this. He had power, not only over the hearts of men, but over the elemental and demonic forces of the universe; he gave meaning, not only to human life, but to the whole created order; he belonged, not only to time, but to eternity. But if so, then the problem of his rejection became more acute than ever. If Jesus belonged to the very structure of the world, why did the world not accept him? How could one possibly explain the bitter reality of the crucifixion?
John's gospel is an attempt to tackle the wider implications of this problem. The technical terms of Jewish religious expectation which are found in the other gospels - Christ, Son of God, Son of Man - were no longer adequate to describe the depth and universality of the Christian's understanding of Jesus. Accordingly, John uses a new vocabulary. Jesus is light, and life, and truth: words which belong more to religious poetry than to the prosaic language of doctrine, and which set Jesus in a much larger frame than could be provided by the traditional categories of the Jewish religion. These words need no explanation, though they take on new depths of meaning as they are put to work in the course of the gospel.
The distinctive character of John's gospel is apparent in the way it begins. The other gospels, confining themselves to a more modest programme, and mainly concerned to show that Jesus was - in some sense - the Christ of Jewish expectation, were each content to describe some of the circumstances in which this Christ made his appearance among men. But John, having so greatly enlarged the scale on which he proposed to tackle his subject, could not regard the story as beginning only with the birth or the first public appearance of Jesus. He needed some way of describing Jesus which would show him to have been an integral element in the created universe from the beginning. For this purpose he chose another suggestive term which featured in the vocabulary of both religion and philosophy: the Word.
No single English word conveys the associations which the word logos would have had for an educated Greek. It meant far more than a mere unit of spoken language: it included any articulate thought, any logical and meaningful utterance; it was that which gave order and shape to the process of thinking-proportion in mathematics, rational intelligibility in the study of the natural world, an ordered account of human affairs. It was almost equivalent to "rationality". As such, it was a convenient tool for philosophy: the Stoics, indeed, used the word logos for the immanent rational principle of the whole universe, the single divine system which (according to their philosophy) underlay the multiplicity of the visible world; and doubtless their use of the word had already begun to influence the everyday speech of many Greek-speaking people who had never troubled to explore the theoretical implications of Stoicism.
To a Greek-speaking Jew, the word had a still wider range of meanings. In the Bible, God's "word" was not only the means by which (as it might be through a prophet) God communicated with men and brought them into obedience to his Law; it was also the expression of his relationship with the whole created universe: God said ... and there was. God spoke ... and it was done. " My word ... shall not return to me fruitless without accomplishing my purpose" (Isaiah 55.11). God's word was an expression of his creative power.
A term which embraced so many ideas could be put to many uses. For Philo of Alexandria, whose life was devoted to the task of expressing the essence of the Jewish religion in terms borrowed from contemporary philosophy, the logos became a philosophical entity in its own right, and seemed in offer the key to understanding the relationship between the transcendent God of the Bible and the world that is known to the human senses. But there
is no reason to think that John was addressing his gospel to readers who were accustomed to any particular or technical use of the word logos: they spoke Greek, and therefore shared the usual Greek understanding of it as a word with a wide range of meanings to do with the rational use of the intellect;
but they were also familiar with Jewish traditions, and knew something of the power and vigour associated in the Old Testament with the Word of God. They were therefore prepared for this logos of John to mean a great deal more than can be expressed in English by "word "; and it was for John to show, by some specimen phrases, in exactly what sense he wished to apply it to Jesus Christ. The first eighteen verses of his gospel may be regarded as a kind of poem in which successive stanzas seek to draw out the implications of this single word, logos.
[These verses are poetical in the further sense that they are more evocative than precise;
hence many of them can be translated in more than one way, as can be seen from the number of alternatives offered in the NEB footnotes. Moreover the sequence of
thought seems less than perfectly logical; and it is possible (as some have supposed) that the writer did not in fact compose the poem himself but found it already in existence and, in adapting it to his purpose, made changes and additions which interrupted its continuity and
disturbed its logic. On the other hand, it is not to be expected of poetry - and certainly not of poetry inspired by the Old Testament - that it should say things in perfectly logical order, any more than that each of the concepts it uses should be capable of exact definition.]
[1:1.] When all things began. In the Greek, the first two words of the gospel are the same as the first two words of the Old Testament; and there can be little doubt that this echo is intentional. The first image brought to mind is the creation. But whereas, in Genesis, the sentence continues with a statement about the first thing that happened - God made the heavens and the earth - here it goes on quite differently: the Word already was. It is as if something is being said, not about creation itself, but about the conditions under which creation was brought about. This was in fact an old line of thought: surely God was not to be imagined as personally supervising every detail of the universe that was being brought into being? The omniscient intelligence which could be seen to underlie all created things, and which indeed rendered them intelligible to man's own power of reasoning - this intelligence was surely not identical with God himself (as some philosophers would have said, who denied the existence of any God beyond that which is revealed in the rational system of the universe)? An answer to these questions had been already supplied in some of the later writings of the Old Testament:
God was assisted at the creation by the figure of Wisdom.
"The Lord created me when he began his work . .. When he marked the foundations of the earth then I was beside him like a master-workman."
(Proverbs 8.22-31)
[This translation follows, not the Hebrew text, but the Septuagint Greek version, It was this version that John's readers were familiar with; and it contains certain small changes In the sense which make it seem to bear more directly on the part played by Wisdom at the creation.]
"With thee is wisdom who knows thy works
and was present when thou didst make the world."
(Wisdom 9.9)
No Jew would ever have been tempted to think of this "wisdom" as a separate deity, usurping the honour of the one true God. On the contrary, wisdom provided a way of speaking of God with greater respect, avoiding the somewhat crude and anthropomorphic idea of God actually at work on the details of his creation, and yet conceding that, in the last analysis, wisdom was nothing other than God, though it was God conceived under the particular aspect of the physical and moral laws of the universe. Nevertheless, it was the way of religious poetry to allow this figure of wisdom to take on almost a life of its own. Wisdom was "beside" God (Proverbs 8.30), it "went forth to make its dwelling among the children of men, and found no dwelling" (Enoch 42.2 - an apocryphal Jewish scripture compiled during the second and first centuries BC.). John clearly stands in this tradition when, in his opening verses, he says similar things about the Word. Only, by using that term (instead of "Wisdom") he brings this old image of Jewish religious poetry within reach of a more philosophical reader.
[1:3.] The Jesus who can be described in such terms is not a figment of the Hebrew imagination, but has to do with those essential and rational principles of the universe that must have existed from the beginning: no single thing was created without him.
[1:4.] By a progression which is again more poetical than logical, two further ideas are associated with the Word: life, and light. Both of these are developed as the gospel proceeds; but the second serves to lead into the next
great theme of the prologue.
[1:5] The light shines on in the dark: the concept s of light presupposes its opposite; light would not be recognized as light if there were no darkness with which to compare it. A scientist would doubtless express the matter differently; but a poet speaks naturally of a light that shines in the dark, and goes on from there to imagine a kind of contest between the light on the one hand and the darkness on the other, the darkness surrounding the light and trying to quench it. This image is the first hint of (the mystery with which the gospel is concerned: the rejection of Christ by mankind. Christ is the Word, an agent of creation, a principle of the universe. As such he is eternal, he can never be mastered or "quenched", as a light can;
[The darkness has never mastered it - is a brilliant rendering, suggested also by R. A. Knox in his own translation (1945), of an ambiguous Greek expression. The words can mean either, "the darkness has never quenched it" (NEB, First Edition), or "the darkness has never understood it", an interpretation which became popular in the Middle Ages, and has found its way into many English versions. Linguistically, the first of these meanings is more probable; but John may well have intended a double entendre. In 12.35 the same word is translated 'overtake'.]
but, just as light presupposes darkness, so the Word presupposes a world which does not understand and acknowledge. It need be no more paradoxical to say that the divine Word was not received than that a light is surrounded by darkness.
But this admission raises a new question. If it was of the nature of this Word that, although integral to the created order, it could yet be ignored and rejected by men, what assurance was there that it would ever be recognized and acclaimed at all? The answer was that there must be "witnesses" to it, men and women whose lives, by being dedicated to the Word and entirely determined by it, would be powerful arguments for its existence and power. Here was a way to understand that strange figure who always stood on the
first page of the Christian story.
[1:
6.] There appeared a man named John - the sentence is suddenly in the style of the Old Testament, and we are reminded at once of the other gospels, where it is as a man in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets - an ascetic preacher of the desert, with something of Elijah about him - that John the Baptist makes his appearance. He fulfils prophecies, he revives the long-silent gift of prophetic speech, he foretells his greater successor and places him in the flaming scenery of the Last Judgement-in short, a figure only comprehensible in a culture shaped by the Bible and conditioned by urgent expectation of a new world-order that is about to come.
[1:7.]
The writer of this gospel suggests a different and less esoteric
role for him: he came as a witness to testify to the light.
[1:9.] The real light which enlightens every man was even then coming into the world. A strictly chronological scheme would yield a different order: Jesus' birth would come before John the Baptist's preaching. But this is poetry, not history: John's sequence of ideas reflects, not the passage of time, but a movement of thought, a movement from the metaphysical implications of the Word which was present with God 'when all things began', to that moment in time when there was on earth a person - Jesus - whose appearance challenged mankind to accept the Word. The description of that unearthly presence on earth is the climax of the prologue; but lest it should be supposed that the splendour of that moment commanded the assent of all who saw it, John first reminds his readers of the point already made: there was darkness around the light, the Word was inevitably not
received, it needed witnesses to commend it.
[1:10.] The world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him. That was true of the world in general; but certain people did recognize him, and these - that is, Christians,
[1:12.] those who have yielded him their allegiance - experienced a relationship with God which could be described as that of the children of God (for a new appreciation of the personal fatherhood of God was one of the distinctive marks of early Christianity).
[1:14.] So the Word became flesh. John makes no attempt to soften the harshness of this terrific proposition. The man Jesus was now at the right hand of God: that was an easy way of putting it, given the limitations of' such naively pictorial language (it was the way most early Christians did put it). But this "Christ" was also - had always been - part of the structure of the universe, something that is essential to understanding the created order; and all this was somehow concentrated in one individual who fully shared the human condition. John had no alternative but to bring into one sentence words which would normally seem to belong to totally different worlds of discourse: the Word became flesh.
He came to dwell among us. The man Jesus was also the Word. An easier way to conceive of this double aspect of Jesus' person is that adopted by most New Testament writers: the two aspects are assigned to two different periods of time. After (and perhaps also before) his life on earth, Jesus was a figure of glory, seated at the right hand of God, superior to all heavenly and earthly powers. But when he was literally 'among us', he was simply man - a unique and exceptional man, no doubt, but so far as his humanity went indistinguishable from other men. By contrast, John makes no such clear distinction between Jesus in heaven and Jesus on earth. Throughout his gospel he invests Jesus with something of the divinity and the glory which belongs to the Word, even though this Word became absolutely flesh, even though Jesus was absolutely human; and so here, his brief description of the manner in which Jesus was among us contains more than a hint of a presence that was all the time something more than merely human, merely 'flesh'. He came to dwell. The translation is as correct as any English rendering can be; but the Greek word has far more overtones than its English equivalent. Originally it meant "dwell in a tent": it was in a "tent" that God had dwelt when he first accompanied his people in their travels across the desert. Moreover, the same Greek word was reminiscent of a Hebrew expression for the glory of God "dwelling" on earth. He came to dwell among us is therefore a phrase which, with its Old Testament associations, already suggests a more than human side to the period of Christ's humanity. The following words - glory, grace, truth - are equally charged with meaning by their use in the Old Testament, where they belong to the vocabulary of God's care for his people; yet almost all these words are ones which will take on new meaning as the gospel unfolds. For the present, they serve as a summary of what it could be said that we saw - that is, not the mihjcctive impressions of one man or of a group of people, but the essential double aspect of Jesus' life on earth to which witness was borne by the whole community of those who had actually acknowledged him, whether after urcing him themselves, or after hearing the testimony of others.
[1:15.] Here is John's testimony to him. The synoptic gospels present a simpler view of John the Baptist's work: John prophesied that a greater than himself would come, and a greater did come. But in this gospel John is not so much a prophet as a witness: he was the first to recognize and give testiimony that a greater had come. Jesus' appearance was such as, in a sense, to put one off the scent. It was John who was drawing the crowds; Jesus only came after (perhaps as a disciple, perhaps simply later in time). On the face of it, it was John who marked the arrival of something new. But his real importance was in the testimony he gave that, despite appearances, Jesus was of superior rank, of another order altogether: 'before I was born, he already was'.
[1:17.] The Law was given through Moses. This was one of the basic premises of Jewish religion. From this flowed the tremendous benefits and privileges which the Jewish people believed they had received from God: the Law was the expression and guarantee of the 'grace and truth' with which God had consistently treated his people. John boldly corrects this ancient belief: grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. But of course it was not just a matter of Jesus having replaced Moses as the bearer of the same benefits as before. The 'grace' received through Jesus Christ was greater than anything received through the Law of Moses: it was grace upon grace.
[1:18.] No one has ever seen God. Pagan religions might speak lightly of gods appearing to men; but the seriousness with which the Jews took the idea of God forbade any such fantasy. God was far too terrible to be 'seen' by men;
at most they might expect to have to face him at the moment of Judgement. Therefore the Jesus whom men had "seen", despite all the near-divine titles given to him, was not in every sense identical with God.
[ As can be seen from the footnote in NEB, the evidence of the manuscripts is divided on this point. Since the exact relationship of Christ to God was one of the most burning questions which agitated the church in the early centuries, it is perhaps nor surprising that a verse which had such bearing on it as this one should have been quoted in different versions by theologians of different persuasions. The version given in the text is that which seems to give the best sense. But the much more difficult reading, which calls Jesus "himseld God", is offered by our earliest papyrus manuscripts, and must therefore have been current within a century of the writing of the gospel.]
He revealed God only to the extent that men could bear it. John uses what in Greek was almost a technical term for the inspired activity of one who imparted truths about God: he has made him known. Men did not literally "see" God in Jesus:
this would have been inconceivable. Through Jesus, they came to "know" God.
[1:19.] This is the testimony which John gave. Jesus' work and message burst upon the Jews of Palestine as something entirely new and original; but it was immediately preceded by a movement which was itself quite out of the ordinary, that of John the Baptist. The gospels differ among themselves in the picture they give of him, and drop occasional hints that there was a good deal more to him than they have chosen to record; and the contemporary historian Josephus also sketches a portrait of him which is recognizably rl the same person, and yet is seen from a quite different point of view. The main question to which Christian writers had to address themselves wan this: the movement of John and the movement of Jesus was each in its own way unique; yet the one came immediately before the other, and there were clear points of contact between them, so much so that it was impossible to tell the story of Jesus without first referring to the story of John. What then was the relationship between the two? Out of what was clearly a mass of tradition about John, the writers of the other gospels selected three points in particular which seemed to point towards an answer.
[1:23.] First, John fulfilled an Old Testament oracle about a voice crying aloud in the wilderness (Isaiah 40.3) which clearly cast him in the role of a person preparing for an event of universal importance; secondly, he was the precursor of someone infinitely greater than himself -
[1:27.] he had used words like those of the humblest of servants about his master, 'I am not good enough to unfasten his shoes'; and thirdly (the most obvious point of contact) he had baptized Jesus.
John's gospel, where it uses the same material, uses it in a quite different way. The quotation from Isaiah, the sayings about the superiority of the Baptist's successor,
[1:32.] and the description of the Spirit coming down from heaven like a dove (one of the phenomena accompanying the baptism of Jesus, according to the other gospels) are all phrased, not as news, but as reminiscences. They describe, not what John did, but what he said. They are his testimony. Accordingly, no interest is shown in what was, after all, his main activity - baptizing. This (as we know both from Josephus and from the other gospels) was a ritual of great significance: it was 'for the forgiveness of sins' (Mark 1.4). But for this writer it had only one meaning: it was the prototype - the first inkling, as it were - of that infinitely more profound experience offered by Jesus to his followers, baptism in Holy Spirit. In itself, it was unimportant: this writer does not even mention that John baptized Jesus. For him, the whole importance of John lay, not in his being a "baptist", but in his being the first "witness" to Jesus Christ.
[1:28.] This is subtly emphasized at the beginning. John, while working at a place
called Bethany beyond Jordan,
[The site of this Bethany had been forgotten even by the time Origen looked for it early in the third century A.D., and there was a tendency to insert into the manuscripts the name Bethabara, the site of which could still be identified. But a possible derivation for the name Bethany is bet aniyyah, House of the Boat - a very plausible name for a small place on the bank of the river which subsequently disappeared. At any rate, an early tradition fixed the place of 'John's baptism on the east bank of the Jordan, near the ford closest to Jericho, just below the small mountain which was believed to be the place where Elijah ascended into heaven - for John had much about him which seemed deliberately to recall the figure of Elijah, even though he is here said to have denied that he was Elijah.]
[1:19.] was confronted by the Jews of Jerusalem - that is to say, by that element in the total Jewish population which was to show itself consistently opposed to Jesus: the men of influence in Jerusalem.
[1:24.]
Here, they are represented first by some of those concerned with the administration and worship of the temple (priests and Levites), and subsequently by more learned men whose interests extended particularly to the interpretation of the Law - some Pharisees.
[1:20.] His reply to them is introduced by a curious phrase: He confessed without reserve and
avowed. In the Greek, as in the English, this sentence appears cumbrous and over-emphatic. But the emphasis of the words is surely deliberate:
John's "testimony" to Jesus demanded, in the first place, that he should make it absolutely clear that his own role, though unique and significant, did not detract in any way from the weight of the titles which would soon be suggested for Jesus. (On Jesus' reaction to a similar question, and on the titles themselves, see above on Mark 8.28.)
[1:26.] However, John's "testimony" does not consist only of statements familiar from the other gospels. 'Among you, though you do not know him, stands the one who is to come after me'. This is something new. One of the many current beliefs about the coming Messiah was that he already existed, and might even be already on earth, but that he was to remain "unknown" until the day when he would be revealed.
[1:11.] This idea was rich in possibilities for explaining the paradox that Jesus, 'the Word', entered his own realm, and his own would not receive him. Jesus conformed to the traditional type of a hidden Messiah; it was only the way in which he was revealed which was totally different from what his contemporaries expected.
[1:31, 33.] He was hidden, at first, even from his first witness: John says twice over, 'I did not know him'. There is evidence in the other gospels that John continued for some time to be in doubt about him.
[1:34.]
But here, he has now seen enough to give his precious evidence: 'I have borne witness. This is God's
Chosen One'."
[Another Old Testament title, probably derived, like "Beloved" in Mark 1.11 and Matthew 3.17, from Isaiah 42.1: "... my chosen in whom I delight; I have bestowed my spirit upon him". Here, as in Mark and Matthew, the reading of some namuscripts gives the much less technical and allusive title, " Son of God".]
[1:29.] 'There is the Lamb of God'. This too is something quite new; but it is hard to know how to interpret it. By the time the gospel was written, the phrase had a rich store of meanings: the death of Jesus, occurring as it did in the course of the Passover festival, could be described as the sacrifice of a Passover lamb (i Corinthians 5.7); and his glorious ascension into heaven as Messiah is represented in the Revelation as the exaltation of a slaughtered Lamb in heaven. If John the Baptist used this phrase about Jesus, he can hardly have foreseen all this, and the only clue to his meaning is in the sequel, 'it is he who takes away the sin of the world'. There was nothing in the Jewish sacrificial system about a "lamb" which could have such atoning power; but the words, takes away the sin of the world, are reminiscent of just one passage in the Old Testament, which describes a Servant of God who was "led like a sheep to the slaughter", and who " bore the sin of many" (Isaiah 53.7,12). It is even possible that the original Aramaic word used by John the Baptist was one which meant both " lamb" and "servant"; if so, John may have been the first to recognize in Jesus the mysterious Servant prophesied in Isaiah 53. However that may be, this is only the first of a series of related images in this gospel: here Jesus is the lamb, later he is the door of the sheepfold, and finally he is the shepherd himself.
After John the Baptist, the gathering of disciples - an episode which necessarily stands near the beginning in all the gospels. John again has a particular interest in it - not so much in the fact that certain disciples decided to follow Jesus, or in the reasons why they did so, but because they too could be called as early "witnesses" to the true nature of Jesus.
[1:38.] The first two, for instance, called him 'Rabbi' (which means a teacher), and their question 'where are you staying?' showed what they meant by it:
a man of fixed abode, who gathered a group of pupils - a kind of "school" - around him. True, Jesus certainly deserved the title Rabbi, and much of his work consisted of teaching; and the prosaic question about his lodging received a prosaic answer. But his pupils were soon to find that he was a great deal more besides.
[1:41.] Indeed, one of these two, Andrew, immediately went on to give a more significant testimony: 'We have found the Messiah' (John characteristically both offers the original Hebrew word and explains that its Greek equivalent is 'Christ'). This led to the adherence of Simon Peter. In the other gospels, the call of these two men takes place beside the Sea ofGalilee.
[1:42.]
Here the setting is quite different; but John's account includes one of the most certain facts in the New Testament: that Jesus gave Simon the name Cephas, of which the Greek equivalent is Peter, the Rock.
[1:43.] Philip appears in the lists of the Twelve given in the other gospels.
[1:45.] His testimony is much the same as Andrew's: 'we have met the man spoken of by Moses in the Law, and by the prophets' - the person, that is to say, to whom so many passages of the Old Testament were believed to point forward, the Messiah, the Christ. It was not in itself implausible that this Messiah should turn out to be identical with a particular man Jesus, of known family (Joseph) and home (Nazareth): many believed that the Messiah would first appear incognito. But what the next disciple, Nathanael, found hard to accept was that the incognito should be so complete. 46 Nazareth was a small, remote place, without even a mention in the Old Testament to give a clue to its future distinction. 'Can anything good come from Nazareth?'
[1:49.]
Nevertheless, his initial doubt soon yielded to recognition, and he gave the most important testimony so far: 'You are the Son of God; you are king of Israel'. Like the titles already given, these will be shown In lie true (in a sense) as the gospel proceeds.
[1:45.] Nathanael is not in any surviving list of the Twelve, and in fact it is not fact said here that he became a disciple. He is brought in, again, entirely because nl i lie value of his testimony. But there was reason to place him as the last and most decisive witness in the scries.
[1:47.] Jesus said, 'Here is an Israelite worlhy of the mime; there is nothing false in him'. He was, in short, the exact opposite of Jesus' Jewish opponents in Jerusalem: he was a true
Israelite, one whose Jewish nationality and upbringing were to yield their proper fruit in making him a man who recognized and acclaimed Jesus for what he was. But how did Jesus know this about him? Was it a guess? Or had he a true gift of prophecy ? This time it was Jesus' turn to be a witness. If you wished to give evidence about a scene you had witnessed, you could be asked about the exact place and time. The question might take the form (as in Daniel and Susanna 51-8), "What kind of tree did it happen under?"
[1:51.] Jesus passed the test; he then went on to cap the series of testimonies with a startling statement of his own: 'You shall see heaven wide open, and God's angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.'
Here again, the synoptic gospels preserve elements out of which this saying could have been constructed. At Jesus' baptism, the heavens were 'torn open' (Mark 1.10); immediately after, in the temptation story, 'angels waited on him' (Mark 1.13); and there are a number of places where Jesus appears to refer to himself in this same oblique way as the Son of Man. But even if these elements were the original material out of which this saying in John's gospel was composed, the result suggests a quite different picture. "Jacob dreamt that he saw a ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven, and angels of God were going up and down upon it" (Genesis 28.12). Grammatically, the last word in the Hebrew could equally well mean "upon him", that is, on Jacob; and in due course Jewish scholars came to be attracted by the possibility. Jacob, after all, was Israel, and the Israel on earth had surely some kind of spiritual counterpart in heaven; might it not be that the verse in Genesis was intended to illustrate the relationship of the earthly and the heavenly Israel? We do not know how much of this kind of speculation was going on in John's day, but it is tempting to see a similar train of thought here: when Nathanael saw Jesus it was as if the true Israelite saw the true Israel in heaven, and his true counterpart on earth. At any rate, the allusion to the Jacob story is unmistakable, and the picture is one which emphasizes what (at least for John) was an essential feature of the mythological title. Son of Man: it meant a figure whose destiny was to be played out both on earth and in heaven.
[2:1.] On the third day there was a wedding. We can fill in a few of the details.
The wedding took place in a small town, Cana, which was about nine miles north-east of Nazareth."
[The modern Khirbet Kana, now a mound of ruins. Another possible site is Kefar Kenna, rather closer to Nazareth on the road to Tiberias. Here, two churches have been built to commemorate the miracle; but the tradition that this was Cana-in-Galilee seems not to be older than the middle ages.]
It was the home-town of Nathanael (21.2) and a place, according to this gospel, visited more than once by Jesus. Certainly, his family was well known there, for the mother of Jesus was present at the festivities, helping with the domestic arrangements (for only men were invited to the actual meal).
[2:2.]
Jesus and his disciples were guests also: whether he was invited because of a family connection, or out of a new respect for him as a teacher, it would have been normal and courteous to include in the invitation those who had begun to form a regular group of disciples around him. Five have been mentioned: there may already have been more. They will have gone, not merely to receive hospitality, but to assist the bridegroom in the formalities and the entertainment which were a necessary part of the wedding and which usually went on for several days.
On the face of it, the story describes how Jesus spared his host a serious social embarrassment. It is possible that Jesus had been partly responsible for the crisis (hence his mother's unexpected approach to him to tell him of the alarm felt in the domestic quarters). He had arrived with a large party, but without bringing the kind of contribution expected of such guests-food and wine. If so, his deed may have been originally understood as a miraculous resourcefulness in the face of an obligation which his chosen way of life made it impossible for him to meet out of his own resources (the story of the tribute-money found in a fish's mouth-Matthew 17.24-7-is on the same lines). In any case, he acted with great discretion.
[2:8.]
The other guests were spared the shock of knowing anything about it, and even the steward of the feast (who was probably a kind of head waiter or master of ceremonies) was not in the secret.
Reduced to these simple terms, the story yields no very obvious moral:
like many of the stories which must have circulated about Jesus, it could only qualify to stand in a gospel if it could be shown to contain some deeper meaning.
[2:11.]
John describes it as one of the signs by which Jesus revealed his glory, and characteristically places a load of significance upon some of the most banal details. In the brief dialogue, for instance, between Jesus and his mother the sentence, 'Your concern, mother, is not mine' [2:4.], can bear more than one meaning. The tone is a little formal ('mother' translates the Greek word meaning "woman", and would have been the correct form of address on such an occasion) and the idiom is the same as that used by the demons to Jesus in Mark 1.24 and 5.7 ('what do you want with me?'). At its simplest level, it need be no more than an expression of surprise and slight annoyance that his mother should have come in to interrupt his attention to the festivities. But (as the NEB rendering suggests) a further meaning is possible: "you are worried about the supply of wine, but my concern is with more important things".
[2:6.]
Again, the six stone water-jars were nothing out of the ordinary, and their impressive size simply underlines the miraculous abundance created by Jesus; but when John adds the detail that they were of the kind used for Jewish rites of purification, we can be sure that we