Three Gospels by REYNOLDS PRICE

Author:REYNOLDS PRICE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TOUCHSTONE
Published: 1996-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

First and basic to the entire account is John’s claim that Jesus both enacted and confirmed his divinity in Galilee a few years ago. Here in Jerusalem in sight of the Temple for the past two years, in acts and metaphors, Jesus has bruited his claim at center stage. And within the Temple courts and in a suburb only yards away, in the months from the winter solstice till now, Jesus has thrown down his wildest “I am” gauntlet and publicly raised the rotting corpse of a man of evident wealth and standing. So when Jesus next courts messianic identity in making his ass-back reentry to the city, John (in contrast to the welcoming crowd) sees him, not as the teacher-Messiah-king of the other gospels but as something utterly new on Earth—a chance once given and not to be repeated.

In other gospels the four days that lie between this hollow triumph and Jesus’ final supper with the disciples are packed with incident and speeches. But John vaults through them. Jesus makes repetitive and oddly unremarkable statements of his mission. The thermonuclear flare of the clash at Tabernacles is never revived, not before his death; and he works no further wonder in the city. Likewise “the Jews” seek no more debate. Their course—and Jesus’ intent—are firmly set for lethal collision, as we have known since Lazarus rose (and since the very prologue to John’s story). In the light of John’s earlier authentic-feeling textures, it hardly seems possible that he lacks a richly detailed memory or a good deal of hearsay concerning the time. The remarkable leanness of his passion-story line then is likely explained by two things—the fact that he has already established “the Jews’” grounds for violence, and John’s own understandable if lamentable rush toward Jesus’ farewell and “glory.”

John’s third large innovation in the passion story appears in his memory of Jesus’ last supper with the disciples on Thursday evening. Knowingly or not, John contradicts the chronology of the other gospels. Mark, Matthew, and Luke state that the supper is the Passover feast. John calmly states that the supper is “[the night] before the feast of Passover” and leaves us a quandary—is his memory accurate, and the other gospels wrong; or has he jogged the calendar by a day to provide a synchrony he will soon reveal?

Then John alone gives us the moment during supper when Jesus strips, girds himself with a towel, pours water into a basin and washes the feet of each disciple, including presumably Judas. Each time the act begins before my reading eyes, I pull back and think “The withering or frozen I Am of John would not do this.” And in fact it is I Am’s most human act since his early chat with the Samaritan woman, since spitting on dirt to heal the blind man, or weeping at the thought of Lazarus dead.

Scholars have proposed dozens of implicit theological meanings for the foot washing. I have read many of them in the hope of

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