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Words and Deeds with Power

In the Gospel of St. John we meet these following incidents:

1. Jesus challenges the Temple authorities: "Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in 3 days." The authorities reply, "It took 46 years to build this temple and you'll rebuild it in 3 days?"
2. Jesus tells Nicodemus, "You must be born again." Nicodemus wonders, "Must we all go back to our mother's womb and thereafter put up with diapers and playpens again?"
3. Jesus offers fresh water to the Samaritan woman beside Jacob's well. She replies, "You don't have a bucket and the well is deep."
4. With only 5 loaves and 2 fishes Jesus decides to hold a picnic for a few thousand followers. His disciples eye each other and ask, "What good are these among so many?"
5. Jesus tells his audience, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you . . . For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink." His listeners turn away in disgust: "This is a hard saying and who can swallow it?"
6. Jesus tells some rabbis, "Abraham rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad." They reply, "You're not yet 50 years old and you've seen Abraham!?"

What do all these incidents have in common? Well, the respondents always interpret what Jesus says or does from within their habitual boundaries of "common sense", their "empirical" experience of reality. Jesus offers water? He should have a bucket. Jesus would feed a multitude? He should have more than 5 loaves and 2 fishes to offer. Jesus claims to be a contemporary of Abraham? But Jesus is not even 50 years old and Abraham has been dead for 1800 years! The respondents are so habituated to their own prosaic experience of life that they can only conclude Jesus must be crazy.

Unless, of course, Jesus benefits from an experience of reality that stretches far beyond that of his audience! In other words, when he speaks words like water or rebirth or temple - which have only a flat, two-dimensional quality when we use them - in his case they are multidimensional. And he loads them with that multidimensional quality to serve as bait to drag us out of our shallow sense of things into that grander, deeper world he inhabits. Whenever he speaks or performs deeds like changing water into wine, it's meant to challenge us to venture beyond our lazy notions about life and nature, to cross horizons the way Columbus did, to discover the world to be round instead of flat and if round then maybe not only round but all awhirl in a cosmic waltz around the sun!?

And so it's not strange that John concludes his Gospel with today's episode in which the risen Jesus, having overcome our common sense notion of "once you're dead, you're dead", confronts doubting Thomas. Thomas won't believe Jesus has risen from the grave. He's a truly modern fellow. "Unless my senses can verify it's really Jesus, I won't buy it," (Anymore than we would buy a car until we've kicked the tires, studied the warranty, done a test drive.) And what does Jesus do? He accommodates Thomas: "Put your fingers here, place your hand in my side. I'll submit to your laboratory approach to life." But then he says, "How much happier are they who are not so timid, who find in faith not an abdication of their intelligence but a gateway to a never ending adventure - who find in my words and deeds a multidimensional stretch that reaches to the beginning and end of all creation - to all they need to know to be truly alive."

-- Geoff Wood