Seite - 38 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/01

38 | Claudia Setzer www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 35–47 gospel. In about half the cases, they mean “to see with the eyes”, and in half they mean “to know” or “to understand”, while in six places they mean both kinds of see- ing. Jesus is called a “light” eleven times in the gospel. Hating evil and doing good equals coming to the light (3:20–21). Many statements show Jesus as the mirror of the Father; seeing him is seeing the Father (5:19, 6:40; 14:7; 14:9). Knowing the Father comes from seeing Jesus: “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him” (14:7) and, to Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). Belief in the resurrection is the result of seeing. The Be- loved Disciple sees the empty tomb and believes (20:8). Mary Magdalene and other disciples express their belief as “we have seen the Lord” (20:18, 25). The symbols of light and darkness pervade stories that are juxtaposed in chapters one and four. Nicodemus, the Jewish teacher, comes to Jesus by night, but fails to un- derstand. The Samaritan woman, by contrast, meets him in broad daylight and comes to understand him in stages, beginning with “I see that you are a prophet” (4:19). Potent symbolism appears in the story of the healing of the blind man, which plays on images of real and metaphorical blindness. Jesus’ claim “I am the light of the world” (9:5) introduces the story. The verb “to see” in the sense of “to know” appears seven times in this story (e.g. “we know that this is our son” [9:20] or “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” [9:25]). As Jesus heals the man blind from birth, the man grows in knowledge of Jesus’ identity, proclaiming him a prophet, his heal- er, the one whom God listens to, then, finally, the Son of Man. The Pharisees/Jews, by contrast, sink lower in understanding as the story progresses. Jesus proclaims, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who do see may become blind” (9:39). The Pharisees ask if they are blind and the punchline of the story is “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘we see,’ your sin remains” (9:41). The seven miracles of Jesus in John are called not miracles, but “signs” to provoke belief.6 In the Hebrew Bible, signs and wonders are God’s manifestations of God’s power. The gospel makes clear that seeing signs reveals Jesus’ identity as the man from God and brings viewers to belief. After the changing of the water to wine at Cana, it reports, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (2:11). When Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus is dead, he adds, “for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe” (11:15), namely as a result of seeing Jesus’ forthcoming miracle of raising La- zarus back to life. The editor mentions other signs not written in the gospel,7 but “these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). 6 Chapter twenty-one is considered a later addition to the gospel, but it contains a sign in 21:14. 7 The possibility of a “signs source”, a collection of Jesus’ miracles known to the author, was first ar- ticulated by Rudolf Bultmann and developed by Robert Fortna and others, but it has not produced consensus.