INTRODUCTION: TELOS AND ETHOS—DEATH AS A SHADOW OF THE NOW
Annie Dillard once said, “How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.” The telos of which we aim, is in some certain way, connected to the ethos of our lived experience. And so it is, when we reflect on our own end—termination or death—the way we die is in some certain way connected to how we have lived. The writers of the canonical gospels seem to entertain this idea as they communicate the significance of Jesus’ life in narrative form. Each account is aimed at the crucifixion and perhaps the implications of this “king of the Jews” being crucified. Not only the crucifixion, but also the space between Good Friday and Easter has great significance for Christian discipleship as one is invited to sit and breathe this stale air. The gospels seem very interested, as they build and arrange the story of Jesus toward the shadow of the cross, in the life leading up to Jesus’ death and the life that continued afterwards. The gospel writers have their own way in depicting the death of Jesus, which sheds light on how we are to understand the significance of his life. This essay will focus on the way the gospel of John tells the story and significance of Jesus with careful attention to how Jesus’ death shapes the ethics of his disciples.[1]
Jesus’ life, depending on how we interpret this life, has the potential to shape our lives and therefore even shape how we die. Life and death are very much connected ideas throughout the New Testament and uniquely connected in the gospel tradition. Tom Wright has said it this way, “We find ourselves caught up by the story of Jesus, by the events of his life, his kingdom announcement, his death, and his resurrection, and we find both that he is himself the goal, the fullness of humanity as well as the fullness of divinity, and that he himself is the way, the journey by which we may ourselves come to that goal.”[2] The end goal that shapes our lived experience is Jesus himself. However, I would argue that to understand Jesus, and implicitly how we are to be human—perceiving both life and death, one would do well to investigate deeply what the writers of the gospel are intending us to conclude from the diverse interpretations of Jesus’ crucifixion—how Jesus faced his ending.[3] Moltmann has said that, “Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ.”[4]
Taking this as a directive, I intend to survey the contents the gospel according to John with close attention to the literary forms employed to communicate the significance of Jesus’ final moments. I will pay close attention to the last words Jesus voices from the cross. Through an inductive process, the diverse interpretations that emerge from within John will allow us to see more fully the ethical implications heard through the ending moments of Jesus’ life. I also intend to see Jesus’ life as microcosm of an eschatological reality that is played out on the stage of human history. To follow the form of ancient biography we would do well to understand the significance of Jesus’ death, “for how a person dies was regarded as a measure of his character.”[5] The character of Jesus, represented in the narrative will aid in the interpretation of Jesus’ death, and in turn, the way by which we may be encouraged to follow him.
“IT IS FINISHED”: DEATH AS A BEGINNING OF THE NEW
The Gospel of John opens with words similar to that of the synoptic tradition in a way. Mark notes αρχη, while Matthew notes γενεσεως as their retellings begins.[6] These opening words both signify a “beginning” or “genesis” to things. Mark and Matthew start with the gospel or the ancestral line of Jesus as a beginning, while John, using the same word Mark uses to kick start his narrative, reaches back further than both Mark and Matthew. John is more in line with Luke since Luke’s genealogy of Jesus lands at “Adam the son of God.”[7] John takes one step back and begins, well, “In the beginning was the word.”[8] Or, closer to the Greek while ignoring the Genesis 1.1 echo we hear so violently in this opening phrase, we might render this phrase, “in first was the logic.” The word αρχη is one the reader would do well to pay close attention to. After 1.2 the word is next used in 2.11 and if we look close it may be very imported for the end of the book, specifically the first eighteen verses of chapter twenty.[9]
John not only shares the verbage of the opening line of Genesis but it also shares an intense interplay of light and dark. The Genesis creation poem includes a refrain that structures the passage as it repeats, “and there was evening and there was morning the […] day.”[10] Jesus is light and illumination throughout John and has “overcome darkness.”[11] So in the first opening narrative it would be interesting to see Jesus in these terms as the text lands at 2.1, “On the third day there was a [….].” It seems John is continuing to build off of the words he opened with. Notice how the later part of chapter 1 shares language with 2.1 and therefore Genesis 1. Verse 29 says, “The next day” as verse 35 follows, “The next day,” and finally verse 43, “The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee.”[12] It is in Galilee then that Jesus does “the first (beginning) of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”[13] In modern translations scholars can’t seem to decide whether to translate αρχη, first or beginning. Either way, the fact that the first two miracles, or—something unique to John, the word σημειων meaning signs, reaches back to the opening line, “In the beginning.” If one is to count out the days from Jesus’ baptism (mastering the primeval waters) to his first sign they number firmly at the number seven.[14]
What could John desire his readers to see and to know and perhaps believe, as the first disciples do at the sign done at Cana of Galilee? What is it about Jesus he is inviting us to believe in? One can conclude that it has something to do with the creation of the world, but his language is too suggestive for us to think that all John wants us to believe is that Jesus, the Word, was involved in the creation of the world—this being some pseudo-tight apologia for the sake of right thinking. Is he suggesting categories beyond this world? Or is he suggesting a rereading of the now? John is trying his best to invite the reader into the narrative matrix of Israel’s scriptures.[15] Perhaps the humming question, and one John will try to answer as the narrative goes on, could be, “What would it look like for the Word to be on the scene again in the creation?” Would it bring about something new? And would it be different than the first creation? N.T. Wright, among others, suggests that we keep counting the signs that John seems to be pointing us to through his numbering[16]
The signs build to chapter 11 were Jesus raises Lazarus to life—and if we are counting the signs, most of us would come up with seven at this point:
1. Changing water to wine
2. Healing the official’s son
3. Healing at the pool of
4. Feeding the five thousand
5. Walking on water (debated as a sign)
6. Healing of man born blind
7. Raising of Lazarus
This just so happens to be the number of days that God carved out in the beginning of time, these first days being the first signs of creation. Through this lens, Jesus’ action in this age becomes for John and his readers the seven signs of the new creation. There is a completeness, (i.e. shalom), to the way of Jesus. These signs have a related dimension as they reveal little by little the glory of God operative in Jesus. Ultimately, for John the raising up of Jesus on the cross—shadowed by the resurrection raising and ascension, is the fullness of glory where he will draw all peoples to himself.[17] It is where Jesus says things are, “finished,” just as God had thought upon at the completion of the world, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished.”[18] One must wonder then further about John’s placement of these words.
Based on John’s interest in beginnings one is left wanting a new day—another start. The glory revealed on the cross, is for the reader, the oddest of images unless they have noticed the three Passovers festival events—that structure the book, some of the first words from John the Baptist—“Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,”[19] and the crosshairs that John seems to focus on the gruesome tree as Jesus’ “hour” approaches.[20] It is the first sign at Cana that introduces us to the hour that is coming, in which: glory, doxology, praise and inevitably belief will be realized. And so what is “finished” on the cross? What has met its end?
In John Howard Yoder’s classic reflection, The Politics of Jesus, he says of the cross, “The believer’s cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer’s cross must be, like their Lord’s, the price of their social non-conformity… it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come.”[21] The new world order has in some definitive way dawned as the old has “finished.” This brings to mind what Jesus has said just a few chapters before, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”[22] Said earlier, the New Testament worldview has allowed life and death to share deep interrelationship—where there is the raising up of a crucified rabbi, there is also a risen Jesus. This “lifting up,” promoting the interconnectedness of the crucifix and resurrection, is introduced early in John and then in Jesus’ resurrection exchange with Mary as he aims Mary’s focus toward the ascension, which reminds us of how the gospel began—the Word with God.[23]
In John, the way to life is the way of Jesus[24] which leads to the cross-bearing that Yoder seems to think is not simply an inner spiritual reality. To place John in the context of early Rabbinic Judaism would be to highlight the rejection that those of John’s envisioned community were experiencing. Chapter 20 of John begins by pointing to this alternative world that Jesus is bringing into the present. Verse 1 speaks of a new “first day” and verse 19 speaks of “evening of that first day.” The first day, we might conclude—of the new world unleashed amidst the old tired structures of oppression and darkness—the way John describes Death being lived out. Ultimately the old social order is death dressed up as life, but in the world reborn—birth being something that you can’t help but experience, life is born through a death.[25] As Jean Vanier wrote, we are, “Birthed in pain and in God.”[26] This summarizes Jesus’ first interaction with the tradition of the Pharisees, specifically with Nicodemus who comes under cover of darkness—a parallel image of death in John. However, eternal life, the term John uses to described the overlap of the present age in conjunction with the eternal age of the kingdom of God, is dependant on rebirth or a turning around—moving through the given categories to “beyond the mind,” as the word “repent” or μετανοειτε insinuates.[27] The new creation is born as the old is turned over to death, summarized through Jesus’ exhale and entrance into exile.
“I AM”: DEATH AS EXILIC MEMORY
In the conclusion to John’s prologue the writer summarizes with, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.”[28] By this, we see the gospel of John bring up one of its most significant thematic interplays, bringing the reader to glimpse Truth itself. Moses asks God, or better, demands of God, “Show me your glory!”[29] near the end of the exodus story—harkening back to his first encounter with the Deity where Moses asks of the Deity the name by which he might call. The showing of glory and naming of God is an attempt by Moses, to in some ways, control the circumstances of his encounter while at the same time is opportunity for God to manifest presence and self-discloser.[30] Even after the encounters Moses has had with God, he has not seen God, and God seems to only want to pass by Moses, “he is granted only a glimpse.”[31] In John, this glory has been glimpsed fully in the flesh.[32] John brings up Moses as a comparison, which brings to the forefront of the readers mind the Exodus narrative. Jesus came to his “own people,” much like Moses did in his first attempt to free the Hebrews—Moses’ “own people.”[33]
Jesus is not Moses, but he is like Moses. John 6.14, echoing Deuteronomy 18.15, makes this distinction very explicit, as Jesus is the “prophet who is to come into the world.”[34] This distinction becomes very important as one begins to draw conclusions as the narrative gets underway. Any good narrative has characters that fulfill certain roles in the thematic sketch of happenings. Jesus, can only be compared and contrasted to elements of Israel’s theological memory, while being defined in the narrative as fully God. Jesus’ role in the narrative, as the one who speaks light into darkness and hovers over the surface of the deep,[35] is telling as the narrative continually points us back to a pivotal moment in the prologue when, “the word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”[36] John is doing a kind of systematic theology through a narrative framework, a framework he shares with Torah and theology he shares mostly with Paul.[37] As an example of a shared framework, we can look to the structure of the book of Exodus, which is broken into two parts. Chapters 1-18 deal with God’s activity while 19-40 describes God’s presence.[38] The gospel of John can be divided in a similar way with chapters 1-12 being the book of signs (Jesus’ activity) and 13-21 being the book of glory (Jesus’ manifestation).[39]
With this in mind, John’s symbolic world, as seen through his description of creation through a reinterpretation of Genesis—previously discussed, is seen further in his obsession with the Exodus narrative and symbols. Moses is a symbol, that, along with the seven εγω ειμι statements, points the reader toward seeing Jesus present in the Exodus narrative. John is attempting a narrative Christology, that, at the text level, insists on us seeing the significance of Jesus through genre and the social function of communal stories.[40] A narrative context, such as the Exodus, provides “ingredient” to any memory with the presence of the scene slowing the story enough for us to enter.[41] Perhaps it is even distinctively human, to describe meaning through story.[42] To summarize, the symbols John uses—pointing toward the event of the crucifixion—are literarily connected to the Exodus narrative, which is rooted in the memory of the Jesus followers John is engaging.[43]
The seven definitive εγω ειμι statements in John stand out in their rootedness in the exodus story for several reasons. First, they echo the divine name uttered by God to Moses. God essentially says that, “I AM who and what, and where and when, and how and even why you will discover I AM.”[44] With this identifying statement placed in its literary context—the narrative of Exodus—God is describing an existence in relationship to all that is to unfold in the narrative. This is as if to say, “I AM all that you will experience as you leave Egypt.” And so this is a clue to the significance of εγω ειμι used in John, being that John puts on the lips of Jesus seven associative symbols that imagine Jesus participating in the exodus as God once did.
1. I am the living bread. (manna)
2. I am the light of the world. (temple)
3. I am the gate.
4. I am the good shepherd. (Moses)
5. I am the resurrection. (Red Sea… he eba—rise up)
6. I am the way the truth and the life. (torah)
7. I am the true vine. (Israel)
Again, seven, is a significant number in Jewish writing, representing: completeness, shalom or even fulfillment—which Jesus is bringing through his actions in the new creation and enactment of a new exodus. Other symbols associated with εγω ειμι statements are loose in their evoking of the divine name however they point further to Jesus being a front and embodiment of the exodus story retold. Jesus is in some ways definitively himself the new exodus.[45] Jesus is the name manifested, the new exodus hitting the ground.[46] But what does that look like and what does the death of Jesus have to do with this motif? How and why does John point us toward Passover to explain this out?
“BEHOLD THE LAMB”: DEATH AND PASCHAL SIGNIFICANCE
At Passover the Israelites were to remember their salvific history, the story that had saving significance for them, even being generations removed. It was the words of Moses’ last sermon that warned the followers of YHWH to not forget the Passover but more importantly, “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there.”[47] The fact that John records three Passover festivals rather than just the one that the synoptics describe, creates an emphasis and attunes the reader to Jesus’ filling-out significance of the Passover celebrated. John places Jesus’ crucifixion on the day of Passover as well, while the synoptics record it in differing chronology. Jesus is then seen as the lamb of Passover, an idea John the Baptist introduces us to from the beginning of the gospel when he says, “Behold the Lamb of God.”[48] Pilate echoes the Baptist’s words in three of his interactions between Jesus and the crowd.[49]
Further, it was customary for the Romans to release a prisoner during the Passover.[50] Ironically, the Romans situate themselves as the ruthless overlord like that of Egypt through this action. Some, if not most, Israelites saw Roman occupation the same way they viewed Egyptian captivity. When Pilate offers the release of a prisoner the crowds shout for the release of Barabbas, a name meaning son of the father. The text is loaded with irony since Jesus is being crucified for his claim to be the “Son of the God.”[51] Jesus’ back and forth with Pilate, as Pilate eventually signs off on Jesus’ death, echoes the interactions between Pharaoh and Moses. Moses deals with Pharaoh for the release of the Hebrews. The text wreaks of Paschal significances. Jesus embodies the figure of Israel as a whole, if, viewed from the exodus narrative. Jesus Paschal death parallels the release of the people from Egypt and in the context of the New Testament, from Rome.[52]
When the gospel of John was written, probably during a time of intense imperial persecution, helps us further make connections if this where a completely historical study. Instead of release or liberation, Jesus is executed as the Paschal lamb with the elusions to his death being a new exodus. But where does his death lead and what typological witness does this have for a disciple of Jesus? What does it mean for a disciple to participate in this death as one participates in the life of Jesus? Is this death something that we can only except for our own personal release from some sort of Egypt—metaphorical or more concretely in an existing of the American way? Rikki Watts, in highlighting the symbol of blindness in the gospel of Mark, points to Isaiah’s New Exodus understanding of darkness and light, blindness and sight, to explain the way in which YHWH is acting in the death of the messianic son.[53] For John the “Egyptian deliverance centered on the death of a sacrifice that substituted for the firstborn on the night of Passover.”[54] Also, John, has from the beginning of the gospel, pointed out that the darkness did not recognize the light of the messianic son figure Jesus—an echo of Isaiah’s call.[55] Jesus’ healing of the man born blind points further to the interesting interplay of light and darkness, which teasing out the theological significance of Jesus interaction with the religious of Israel and the prophetic announcement of judgment that was typological to in the character of Israel’s prophets.[56] However, Brueggemann mentions that, “the hope Jesus announces here is heavy and hard. It contrasts sharply with the cheap and cross-free hope of the royal consciousness.”[57]
This is the royal consciousness of empires in the long line of kingdoms that stand as anti-kingdoms of the age to come. These are the idolatrous statues, representing kingdoms, that surround the stone that is throw to the earth, which lands at the feet of the statue only to become a mountain in Daniel 2.35.[58] The way of the kingdom of God, and for John—the eternal age of heaven—breaks in through the death of Jesus in a definitive way much like the apocalyptic imagining of Daniel. Jesus is planted in the ground and lifted up just as the stone landed only to emerge mountainous. Daniel’s text as a whole awaits liberation from exile and reaches to exodus categories for the meaning of exile. Further, this “lifting up” of Jesus has more in common with the exodus than we might see at first glance. The first mention of this motif in John is paralleled with the actions of Moses in the dessert,[59] but even linguistically the Son of God is lifted up as the Israelites are lifted up (he eba) from Egypt. Israel is often seen as God’s only son whom God calls out of Egypt to new identity and restored covenantal relationship.[60] So the death, or better, exile of Jesus into slavery and bondage is potentially redemptive. A Christologically focused understanding of death, not just resurrection, is inherently stirred with possibility. The death of the Paschal lamb is an avenue of possibility for God’s delivering justice for the community.[61]
CONCLUSION: IN THE END THE BEGINNING—DEATH AS ECCESIAL PRAXIS
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was situated in circumstances that required a kind of posture that was largely alternative to the dominant social reality where he lived the bulk of his life. Coming to terms with his own experience as he read the teachings of Jesus, the call to discipleship was clear. It was the first and the last thing Jesus invites us toward in the canonical tradition.[62] For Bonhoeffer, “discipleship means adherence to the person of Jesus, and therefore submission to the law of Christ which is the law of the cross.”[63] Even if this posture involves “grave and constant peril of persecution”[64] it is better than living as dehumanized individuals without hope of creation, that is, a movement from chaos to order. To live fully is to hope, knowing that “all human life draws toward death.”[65] The gospel of John portrays “the community of believers as deeply alienated from the world, perhaps even ontologically distinct from the world.”[66] The distinctiveness of the community is itself, an alternative existence. Through Exodus we glimpse the alternative community of Moses as an expression of “new realities against the more visible ones of the old order” while Jesus words from the cross voice an “alternative consciousness”—one that disciples give their being toward in the participation of God’s freedom.[67] This participatory activity and “adherence to the person of Jesus” ultimately lands, for John, in ecclesial praxis.
John Howard Yoder, as he describes apocalyptic realities—the place from which we understand eschatology and the eternal age that John insists has begun—he says, “It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social processes to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of one’s battles for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the resurrection of the slain Lamb.”[68] He has also concluded that, “the people of God is called to be today what the world is called to be ultimately.”[69] The very exist of the cross-bearing community is an “affront to the ethos” of the ideological freedom of the nation state. [70] At the beginning of this essay I intended to focus on the way the gospel of John tells the story and significance of Jesus with careful attention to how Jesus’ death shapes the ethics of his disciples. Inductively, this has led toward an embodied imperative shaped by narrative. In his return from the exilic death and vocal conclusion of tired old structures of the given world, Jesus has freed humanity to be the kind of community that might enter the story of the creation and exodus.
This story-formed ethic “centers on the claim that an agent’s being is prior to doing.”[71] John 13.34 brings up this reality through the “new command” of Jesus: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Perhaps the newness of the command, reverberating with the truth that new creation is on the scene in Jesus, while the imperative reminds us of the law given at Sinai. The whole of Torah is 613 commands that are implicit in the “ten words” which Moses brought down from Sinai. The rabbis counted the number of Hebrew letters that make up Exodus 20.2-17 (the ten words) and the number just so happened to be 613.[72] But the ten can then be broken down further into two spheres, in which, the first five deal primarily with God and the remaining with neighbors. This was a common interpretation in the time of Jesus, one he even seems to agree with.[73] So, why a new command? And what is so different about this command? To love one another is a command than envisions a community and can only be done through being a loving community. It is in some ways the end of doing and the beginning of being.
The condition, or guiding directive, as to how a community can be love together is heard through the latter part of the verse, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” How is it then, that Jesus has loved his disciples? To what extend and medium has he enacted this love? Surely John intends for us to remember—in the narrative just previous—when Jesus was washing the disciples feet, but we can assume also that feet washing can be connected to the work of a servant in broader terms. Jesus’ life was so full of love and compassion for the other that this led to perfect fulfillment of the greatest kind of love.[74] This love is the telos that narrates the ethos of the Christian community.[75] This love and fuller understanding of the world is the praxis “set forth in person”[76] and story, the pursuit of which, is enacted through the participatory pattern of Christ where life and death find surprising reversal.
This is the stuff of resurrection—the kind of life that passes through death. However, for the follower of Jesus, the disorientation, as Brueggemann calls it, is the place where lament finds it’s home.[77] It is where we cry out in horror, while that very cry—as it did in the exodus and through the death of Jesus, begins redemptive history.[78] It is a place of honest abandonment that hopes in possibility yet faces the chaos with selfhood fully intact. Our “glad abandonment” is an “embrace of an alternative image of reality.”[79] The cross disorientates us and shakes the ground we thought to be secure while at the same time is the “paradigm for faithfulness to God in this world.”[80] The words of Jesus, “it is finished” echo in their cry a beginning through an ending that invites disciples to be shaped by this paradigm of God’s own faithful story retold.
[1] Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5.
[2] N. T. Wright, “Faith , Virtue, Justification, and the Journey to Freedom,” The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, ed. Ross Wagner, Kavin Rowe, and Katherine Grieb (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 477.
[3] Forgive the use of telos as both ‘ending’ and ‘goal’, this will work its way out in the essay.
[4] Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 19.
[5] Joel B. Green, “The Gospel according to Mark,” The Cambridge Companion to The Gospels, ed. Stephen c. Barton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 143.
[6] Mark 1.1; Matthew 1.1.
[7] Luke 3.38.
[8] John 1.1.
[9] John 20.1 “On the first day.” John 20.19 “On the evening of that first day.”
[10] Genesis 1.5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31.
[11] John 1.4-9; 9.4-5.
[12] John 1.29, 35, 43 (NRSV).
[13] John 2.11 (NRSV/NASB).
[14] Raymond Brown, The Gospel and Epistles of John: A Concise Commentary (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1988), 29.
[15] Richard B. Hays, “The Canonical Matrix of the Gospels,” The Cambridge Companion to The Gospels, ed. Stephen c. Barton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53.
[16] John 2.11, 4.54.
N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of The Son of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). 669. also, N.T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 34.
[17] John 12.32.
[18]Genesis 2.1-2. Wright, Following Jesus, 40.
[19] John 1.29.
[20] John 2.4; 12.23.
[21] John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 97.
[22] John 16.33b (TNIV).
[23] John 3.14,15; 20.17//1.2.
[24] John 10.10; 14.6.
[25] John 3.5-10.
[26] Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus: through the Gospel of John (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), 279.
[27] Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1993), 49.
[28] John 1.17,18 (TNIV/NASB).
[29] Exodus 33.18.
[30] William H.C. Propp, Exodus 19-40, The Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman, vol. 2A (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 607.
[31] Ibid.
[32] John 1.14b, 1 John 1.1-4.
[33] John 1.11 // Exodus 2.11. In Exodus this phrase is used twice for emphasis. It is also what God does from the heavenly realm depicted in Isaiah 59, 63. See, John Goldingay, Israel’s Gospel, OTT, vol. 1 (Downer Groves, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 309.
[34] Joel Marcus, The Way of the Lord: Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 85. John 6.14 (NRSV).
[35] John 1.5; 9.39; John 6.19.
[36] John 1.14.
[37] John Goldingay, “Biblical Narrative And Systematic Theology,” Between Two Horizons: Spanning NT Studies & Systematic Theology, ed. Joel B Green and Max Turner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 135.
[38] John Durham, Exodus, WBC, vol. 3 (Waco, TX: Word Publishing, 1987), xxii.
[39] Raymond Brown, The Gospel and Epistles of John, 16.
[40] Mark Stibbe, John As Storyteller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 67.
[41] Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (NY: Basic Books, 1981), 63.
[42] D Moody Smith, “The Historical Figure of Jesus in 1 John,” The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, ed. Ross Wagner, Kavin Rowe, and Katherine Grieb (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 322.
[43] Craig Koester, Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community, ed. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 3.
[44] William H.C. Propp, Exodus 1-18, The Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman, vol. 2A (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 204. Exodus 3.14.
[45] see, John 8.28; 10.36; 14.11; 17.6; 18.6
[46] John 17.6, 11.
[47] Deuteronomy 24.18.
[48] John 1.29,36.
[49] John 19.4,5,14. Ιδου (Behold I bring him out // Behold the man// Behold your king).
[50] John 18.39.
[51] John 19.7.
[52] Richard Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 15.
[53] Rikki Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1997), 250.
[54] Tom Holland, Contours of Pauline Theology: a radical new survey of the influences on Paul’s biblical writings (Scotland, UK: Mentor Imprints, 2004), 169.
[55] John 1.5,10; Isaiah 6.9,10.
[56] John 9. 39. Donald E. Gowan, Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death and Resurrection of Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 6.
[57] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, ed.2 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 110.
[58] Paul M. Leberach, Daniel, Believer’s Church Bible Commentary (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1994), 65.
[59] John 3.14.
[60] Hosea 11.1; John 3.16; Matthew 2.15.
[61] Glen Stassen; David Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Downer Groves, IL: 2003), 353.
[62] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship ( New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1949), 48. Mark 1.17//John 21.22.
[63] Ibid, 96.
[64] William Springfellow, An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco, TX: Word, 1973), 119.
[65] Jurgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning (London: SCM Press, 2004), 119.
[66] Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 139.
[67] Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 14,96.
[68] Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grains of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2001), 6.
[69] John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices Before the Watching World (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), ix.
[70] Stanley Hauerwas, “No Enemy, No Christianity,” The Future of Theology: Essay in Honor of Jurgen Moltmann, ed. Miroslav Volf, Carmen Krieg, and Thomas Kucharz (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 33.
[71] Stanley Hauerwas, Community of Character: toward a constructive Christian social ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 113.
[72] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted through the Generations (New York: Continuum Books, 2007), 543.
[73] Brad H. Young, Meet The Rabbis: Rabbinic Thought and the Teachings of Jesus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007), 193.
[74] John 13.1; 15.12.
[75] N. T. Wright, “Faith , Virtue, Justification, and the Journey to Freedom,” 475.
[76] David Augsburger, Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God and love of Nieghbor (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 33.
[77] Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), 24.
[78] Ibid. 106. Exodus 3.7.
[79] Ibid. 113.
[80] Hays, Moral Vision of the New Testament, 197.
