Abstract
We live in an age of violence. I am sure all people of all ages could probably say the same thing. We are creatures who act in and react to violence. Spring 2023, however, has felt as though the violence of Western culture has ratcheted up even more with the ongoing war in Ukraine, along with regular mass shootings and a series of additional shootings of people simply arriving in the wrong driveway or knocking on the wrong door. In the United States, we have become so accustomed to violence that few of these headlines seem to shock us anymore. These acts of violence and their coverage in the media, however, also lead to the perpetuation of violence as people learn to fear one another, feeling the need to carry arms to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Unfortunately, all too often sacred texts have been used to justify such fear and violence. In a country in which some among the “Religious Right” align the gospel with the US Constitution and especially the right to bear arms, we should look more closely at these sacred writings. Do they permit, or even endorse, such views and actions, or are they calling us to make different choices and to learn to see past fear, looking instead with love? In Caleb O. Oladipo’s opening essay, “A word about . . . Violence in a pluralistic age: Constraints and opportunities for Christians,” he examines the idea that monotheism ultimately causes violence since the exclusivity of monotheistic religions clashes with competing claims. Indeed, throughout Christian history Christians have used their sacred texts, including the Gospel of John, to justify imperial violence in the name of evangelism. Instead of reading texts this way, however, Oladipo calls on Christians to have a more “mature faith” that challenges traditional, even orthodox, interpretations that endorse violence. In true monotheism, there is no competition between religions since all people and all things belong to the One God. Peace, then, comes from a way of living in rhythm with God’s creation. Oladipo’s challenge for us to examine our sacred writings more closely, especially the violence found within them, provides a foundation for the essays that follow.
The collection begins with “A word from a seminarian . . . The grace of hearing and remembering” by Sara Acosta, a graduate and current MDiv student at Campbell University Divinity School. Acosta challenges us to consider how we apply biblical texts, incorporating not only their ancient contexts, but their contemporary, pastoral significance. Focusing on the story of Hannah’s infertility in 1 Sam 1:1-20, Acosta pushes against standard readings that persist in simplifying, or simply overlooking, Hannah’s personhood and suffering. Like Hannah, women today still wrestle with social and personal expectations of motherhood, often facing the trauma of infertility without spiritual support. When we focus on Hannah’s experience, however, Acosta suggests we can see God’s presence in her story, helping women today find a connection to the divine, even when their stories do not end in the same way. For Acosta, hope exists even in biblical texts that have been used violently, intentionally or not. She gives readers an example of the type of examination Oladipo envisions.
The heart of this issue is an exploration of the Gospel of John. Like all the Gospels, John’s is a story about the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As such, it narrates violent moments, none so clearly as Jesus’s crucifixion (19:1–30). Yet, even before this pivotal moment, the Fourth Gospel has other violent scenes, beginning with Jesus’s own actions, expelling animals and merchants from the temple precincts before predicting his own death and resurrection (2:13–22). As the story unfolds, plots against Jesus’s life begin (5:18; 7:11, 25; 11:53), a crowd seeks to “make him king by force” (6:15), and he miraculously avoids being stoned twice in the temple as he approaches his fated “hour” (8:59; 10:31). In what the narrator depicts as the providential moment, during the lead up to the Gospel’s third Passover celebration, Jesus is arrested but not before he lays flat the Roman cohort and Jewish attendants who came to arrest him with his proclamation, “I am” (18:6). Rather than meeting these threats and violent attacks with physical force, however, Jesus uses words to speak truth. His disciples cannot understand this choice. Peter, the one who says he is ready to die for Jesus (13:36–38), draws a sword when Jesus is arrested. He is ready to die, but only in an active sense. Like a modern-day action hero, Peter will go out fighting and take some others out with him! Jesus, however, stops him and willingly surrenders to the unlawful authorities who have come to arrest and, eventually, to execute him (18:10–12).
Clearly, the Gospel of John is full of violence. It narrates violence and shows Jesus’s various responses to the violence committed against him. Set in the world of the Roman Empire, Jesus operates his ministry under its watchful gaze. Even though Rome spread propaganda of “peace,” it was an empire known for surviving only through conquest. Tacitus quotes a British leader he calls “Galgacus” describing the Romans thus: Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.
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While Rome was largely successful in establishing stability in conquered lands through integrating local elites into the imperial bureaucracy, first-century Palestine was the site of continual rebellions and revolts against Roman-appointed kings and governors. Quick to put down such revolts, Rome had a reputation for securing and retaining its peace through threats of violence as well as actual force. When the Gospel of John presents the Jerusalem leaders, priests, and Pharisees, concerned about the Roman reaction to yet another peasant from Galilee gaining a following, their fears are well founded (11:47–53).
Issue overview
The essays in this issue of Review and Expositor examine key scenes from John’s Gospel that depict Jesus’s responses to violence. Andrew J. Byers’s article (“‘Put your sword back into its sheath’: A Johannine approach to nonviolent resistance”) begins the collection with an overview of the Gospel’s general disposition toward power to examine its response to violence, exploring John’s key conflict as one between “cosmic evil” that “co-opts Rome and the Jewish leaders” and God, who acts definitively through Jesus. In the face of violence, Byers emphasizes Jesus’s “self-restraint” that undermines the imperial ideology by offering a new vision for the world. The second article is my own (“Revelation through violence? Jesus in the temple in John 2:13–22”), which focuses on Jesus’s violent outburst in the Jerusalem Temple. Unlike other Gospel scenes in which Jesus ignores or even submits to the violence committed against him, in this scene Jesus initiates the violence on holy ground. I argue this moment serves to confirm Jesus’s identity as God’s holy one who has come into the world but is nevertheless rejected, even in his “Father’s house,” the temple. Focusing on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman views about how holiness “breaks out” when profaned, I argue ancient audiences would have seen Jesus’s behavior as revelatory and justified. Yet, rather than destroying those around him, Jesus shifts the narrative by predicting his taking on the violence of the world along with his conquest of it through his resurrection (2:20).
The next two articles focus on John 7–8, a section of John’s Gospel that contains some of the most vitriolic language against Jews in the Christian canon. Indeed, people claiming to be “Christians” have used Jesus’s debate with the Jews in John 8:31–59, in particular, to justify anti-Semitism and violence against Jews, even to this day. Both Sherri Brown and Josiah D. Hall argue, however, that Jesus’s responses to those who challenge him are remarkably nonviolent. Brown in her article, “Jesus and violence during Tabernacles: Wit, mercy, and accountability in John 7–8,” takes a closer look at how the Feast of Tabernacles frames Jesus’s debates with the Jews and the “exceptional claims” Jesus makes for himself. Although a later addition to the Gospel, Brown argues one must take seriously the story of John 7:53–8:11 that appears in the middle of the intense debates of John 7–8. In this story, she argues, Jesus demonstrates “an alternative of mercy,” thereby proving “a powerful antidote to the chaotic violence that surrounds it.” Hall (“Hearing the non-violence in a silent departure [John 8:59 and 10:39]”) also highlights Jesus’s nonviolent responses noting, in particular, how his peaceful exits contrast with ancient expectations of divine wrath that usually followed rejected epiphanies. Even though Hall interprets Jesus’s ultimate departure from the temple, and the world, as divine judgment for his rejection, Hall notes it is “distinctively nonviolent.” With Jesus as a model for how to respond to rejection, the Gospel is “less antagonistic against unbelievers, especially Jews, than is often assumed.”
Jesus’s acceptance of the violence committed against him by laying down his life has sometimes been seen as the fourth evangelist’s approval of a utilitarian ethic of expediency uttered by the high priest Caiaphas in John 11:50. In her article, “‘It is advantageous for you that one man should die and not that the whole nation should perish’ (John 11:50): A reassessment of Caiaphas’s argument from expediency,” Lidija Novakovic challenges this perspective, arguing that Jesus’s death is beneficial because Jesus chooses to die on behalf of the many and not “because the reasoning ‘one for many’ is morally justifiable.” Moreover, she notes that Caiaphas’s own plan to save Jerusalem and the temple from Roman destruction ultimately fails, a fact readers of John’s Gospel would certainly know. Arthur M. Wright Jr. also focuses on how John’s Gospel would be understood in its Roman context in “A big, big house(hold): John 14 as a response to Roman imperial violence.” Although many interpreters suggest in John 14:1–7 Jesus describes the heavenly “mansions” believers can look forward to after death, Wright argues instead that Jesus’s words were meant to help believers in their present lives, particularly in the face of violence. Wright suggests the “many dwelling places” promised by Jesus are reciprocal relationships believers experience as part of God’s household. In this way, the Gospel offers an alternative vision that combats Roman imperial propaganda of the emperor as father who exercises dominion through violence.
Dorothy A. Lee’s article, “The significance of the wounds of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel,” rounds out the thematic articles in this issue. Lee asks the profound question of why Jesus’s resurrected body still carries the wounds inflicted in his death? For Lee, these eternal wounds are significant for interpreting Jesus’s death and resurrection in the Gospel since they help believers to recognize their Savior, to understand the theological import of his death, and to see in them hope for new life from resurrection. Rather than continued testimony of Rome’s might, Jesus’s wounds ultimately showcase God’s victory. In the end, she concludes, “The wounds of the Johannine Jesus thus spell the end of what they embody: suffering and its healing, violence and its peaceful resolution, death and its defeat.”
Overall, then, while contributors all acknowledge the pervasive violence retold in John’s Gospel, they agree this story does more to combat violence than to endorse its continued use. Nevertheless, Byers’s warnings of reading from above and below remain critical. Recognizing John’s Gospel as a story written “from below,” that is, by people without power, one finds within it a script meant to counteract the Roman imperial violence they experienced each day, as well as any threats they faced because of their belief in Jesus as God’s Son and Christ in particular. While Jesus himself may have had the authority to come with judgment against such an Empire, he repeatedly chooses not to, but instead takes the violence in himself to overcome it. John’s Gospel, therefore, while exclusivist in its vision of God and Jesus, does not endorse violence, but instead teaches an ethic of love and self-sacrifice.
This special issue of Review and Expositor ends with three expository articles that also explore violence. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw (“The woman saved from stoning: An answer to scapegoats and scapegoating”) returns attention to John 7:53–8:11. Reading the passage through the lens of René Girard’s scapegoat theory, Bashaw argues John depicts the entrapped woman as a potential scapegoat for the religious leaders whose ire is directed at Jesus. Like Brown, Bashaw also sees in this passage an “antidote” to violence, especially the violence of scapegoating, in Jesus’s “calming a scapegoating storm, de-escalating a mob, and thwarting the scapegoaters.” In “On the list and at the well: Finding encouragement in Christ’s acknowledgment and ministry,” Sarah Boberg explores the story of the Samaritan woman (John 4:1–42) as a backdrop to her own recent experience of being placed on Mike Law’s “list” of women pastors at Southern Baptist–affiliated churches. For Boberg, Jesus’s meeting the woman at the well resonates with her own story of meeting Jesus in surprising locations and equipping her for her calling as a minister. Jesus’s conversation with the woman, and her sharing this word with the Samaritans, moreover, demonstrates for Boberg Jesus’s dismissal of sexist attempts to keep women from exercising their divine callings. Finally, Latonya Latrice Agard gives the last word in “After the pain: A sermon on John 20:19–20,” returning us both to the trauma of Jesus’s death and the life of his resurrection. Taking the reader on a journey through the experience of the disciples, women and men who witnessed Jesus’s death as well as those who gathered afterward having heard about it, Agard encourages us to identify the trauma of those moments and days. She highlights Jesus’s appearance, alive and scarred, in the midst of their trauma as a way to bring them “peace” and life. When joining the disciples in the moments of trauma and remembering Jesus’s victory and gift, people can find hope for their lives as well.
As we all live in a world that seems ever-more fascinated by and replete with violence, the Gospel of John still has something to teach us. It can show us that, while so much is different in our world two thousand years later, so much is still the same. Indeed, Rome’s imperialism has often been compared to British rule in the past as well as current US policies and cultural hegemony. The Gospel of John offers readers a glimpse into how some of Jesus’s earliest followers understood his ministry, death, and resurrection and what these actions meant for their lives under Roman rule. But, in so doing, this Gospel also gives contemporary audiences, whether they live under Western imperial ideologies or not, possible ways to resist and respond to violence and its aftermath. John’s Jesus neither allies with Rome, bowing to its threats and violence out of fear, nor does he respond with violence of his own, even though he is God’s Word made flesh. Even in moments at which modern readers, along with ancient audiences, might have expected Jesus to lash out in violent judgment, he undercuts these expectations, choosing to love and spread peace instead. Jesus, therefore, offers a third way built on the belief that God is the one and only Creator of the world and, therefore, the only true Emperor who deserves allegiance, or what one might call “belief.” God, as rightful Ruler, shows love for the world and conquers through the revelation of a crucified and risen Savior who teaches his own followers to imitate his love rather than the world’s hate (13:33–35; 15:12–25; cf. 17:20–26).