Page - 37 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

“This Voice Has Come for Your Sake” | 37www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 35–47 observes that every symbol for Jesus relates to a corresponding human problem. If Jesus is the light of the world, people are blind or in darkness. If he gives living water, people must be thirsty. If people are separate from God, he is the Way.2 John offers three innovative theological responses to humanity’s problems that push at the normal boundaries of physical bodies in time and space. First, in the in- carnation, Jesus, the vehicle for knowledge of God, takes on a human body. Second, John’s “realised eschatology” sees the community as already living in the new, glo- rious reality, while simultaneously looking towards the future for final redemption. Third, the gospel promises that after Jesus returns to heaven, the Paraclete, or Ad- vocate, will come, remaining with the community as the continuing non-corporeal presence of Jesus. To express his relatively sophisticated theology, the author takes a route through the body and the senses. Despite the gospel’s reputation as “the spiritual gospel”3 and its undeniable cosmic dualism that denigrates this world, matter, and flesh (1:13), it is sensuous, materialist, and body-oriented. The incarnation, usually expressed along the lines “the Word (Logos) became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14), is more literally translated as “the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us”. The word “dwelt” or “tented among us” (eskēnōsen hēmin) is an obvious reference to the tent, or tabernacle in the Hebrew Bible, the portable sanctuary that Israel carried through the desert after the Exodus. As it was the physical manifestation of God’s presence with the people in exile, so John implies that Jesus is the physical presence of that same God who lives among his followers. The gospel invokes all the senses, both metaphorically and literally.4 Martha fears the smell of death at Lazarus’ tomb (11:39), but later the aroma of perfume fills the air when her sister Mary anoints Jesus’ feet (12:3). Jesus heals by spitting, kneading mud, and daubing it on the blind man’s eyes (9:6). He invites Thomas to touch his wounds in order to believe it is he (20:27), but shakes off Mary Magdalene in the garden, saying, “do not hold on to me” (20:17). Jesus insists that only the one who feeds on his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life and shares his being (6:53–58). Three times John uses the word trōgein, “feed on”, a word that originally applied to animals eating plants, meaning “to gnaw, nibble, or munch”. Robert Kysar expresses the startling nature of John’s assumption that “the ultimate reality of the Universe – God – is to be experienced through a grasp of the mundane sensory experiences of life”.5 The most frequent sense reference is to sight, a virtual equivalent to understand- ing in John. Forms of the verbs “to see” appear roughly one hundred times in the 2 Koester 2006, 408. 3 Clement of Alexandria is cited by Eusebius as defending the gospel’s place in the canon, “John, per- ceiving the external facts had been made plain in the gospel, being urged by his friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual gospel” (Ecclesiastical History 6.14.5–7). 4 See Lee 2010. Dorothy Lee argues that the sense imagery flows from the importance of the incarnation and functions to aid human imagination. 5 Kysar 2007, 105–106.