Here are my (still very rough) thoughts on John 21 as I wrote them out late on Wednesday night and that I presented very briefly last night:
"Memory is the ‘self’, because it is my presence to myself, the way in which I constitute myself and understand myself as a subject with a continuous history of experience. I am not a subject with a remembered past, I ‘transcend’ these limitations. I can understand them, put them in perspective, move on from and through them. Thus whatever stimulates and nourishes ‘transcendence’ in this sense has to do with presence to myself, and so with memory." (Rowan Williams, Resurrection 31)
The Hebrew Bible was full of stories of “return” and finally ends with a story that can’t be concluded, a return that can’t finally be accomplished. Even when they get back to Jerusalem they cannot exactly “return.” In a wonderful essay on memory that I’ve just read, André Aciman’s “Arbitrage,” Aciman cites the Hebrew Bible scribes in his own complicated return to a land from which he had been exiled:
"[W]hen I eventually returned to Egypt in 1995, I caught myself looking at my beloved Mediterranean through tiny side streets and felt a sudden yearning for West End Avenue, looking toward the Hudson River through 106th Street—which had become my dearest spot on earth precisely because it reminded me of Alexandria. I was, in Alexandria, homesick for a place from which I had learned to re-create Alexandria, the way the rabbis, in exile, were forced to reinvent their homeland on paper, only to find, perhaps, that they worshipped the paper more than the homeland or the way that prisoners who express their love for the free world by painting its portrait in their cell wall come to worship the walls and not the world." (False Papers 157)
So the post-Resurrection stories are also stories of a return finally—these Gospels conclude the same way the Hebrew Bible was concluding. And indeed, we’ve seen all kinds of ways in which the two testaments are similar: the type-scenes, the prophecies, the way the relationship to the land is eschewed in parables and miracles that often speak of the fruits of the land, but only ever metaphorically, and not as the land itself, but as the fruits of the land—food in particular. Note also how those food stories are also stories of, as Crossan says, “open commensality.” Land becomes food, and food is shared by all—in the same space. This goes, of course, to the other major thing that is being repudiated in these new stories, and that is the religious restrictions. Holloway talked about this; Crossan talked about this: the relationship with God is no longer about laws and purity, but about faith. The Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-30 made that clear: everyone can eat, even the dogs under the table. Jesus says to the woman with a hemorrhage, “go your faith has made you well.”
But the one story that was really a problem in the Hebrew Bible was the story of the frustrated return to God. So the Gospel writers are going to take that as the biggest literary challenge of their own story—they have to retell the story of return, or memory—which was the biggest part of the HB: memory, return, reconciliation. I take you back to the Tamar story, the Joseph story—the two most important stories I think in the entire HB: a family, a people alienated from itself because a member of the family has done wrong (Judah, Joseph’s brothers). Something has to be remembered, and through that memory reconciliation has to occur. Let’s think a little more specifically about the Judah and Tamar story:
You have Tamar, a woman who is sometimes reviled for her behavior, but who is innocent, more sinned against than sinning; completely blameless.
Despite her betrayal by her family (read: the disciples, and Peter) she reconciles them to her, but not until she’s made her father-in-law retell the story, recognize her, and reconcile himself to her by asking for forgiveness.
She is almost literally resurrected in the text: Judah has left her for dead and, more notably, her absence means the death of the family. The twins she carry do, almost literally, resurrect the family—bring them back to life. With that reconciliation thus, there is a future; with her "resurrection" the family can continue, can have a future as Israel.
The only thing that is missing is the food—but we get that in the Joseph reconciliation story, which rehearses all the elements of the Tamar story and includes the business about the grain, the food the family needs to survive.
One thing to think about and to remark on is that the Tamar story is the first story, the story the serves as the model for all the other stories, and it is a woman who is at the heart of it. This in many ways is picked up by the Gospels, who have a woman seeing Jesus first at the tomb, a woman recognizing him, a woman being named by him (in John’s gospel).
So here we are in the Greek Bible, and the possibility of reconciliation to the land and to Jerusalem is just about absent completely: the Romans are just the last in a long line of colonizers, of occupiers. The entire story, now, is told in the context of occupation, of the catastrophe of losing the Temple. Then Jesus is crucified. And not just by the Romans but, in a sense, by his own disciples, who are totally complicit with what has happened—they haven’t stood up for him, they haven’t put their own lives on the line for him. Peter, of course, is the best and most heartbreaking example of this: three times you will deny me, predicts Jesus, and Peter insists that that will never happen: John 13:36-38:
Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.” Peter said to him, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.”
And then three times indeed Peter denies him—John does this the best:
John 18: 15-18 (the first denial):
Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus unto the courtyard of the high priest, but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in. The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself.
The ones who don’t abandon him in all the Gospel accounts, of course, are the women. And they are the first to see him post-Resurrection as well. (The most moving of these accounts, in my opinion, is the one that has Mary, “supposing him to be the gardener” in John.) In John, Jesus then comes to them and Thomas touches his side and they all believe. And then John seems to end, at the end of chapter 20. But then there is this curious chapter 21.
Here are some of the things to note in it:
1. They are going fishing—though they are not fishermen anymore. But they are attempting to return to their former selves. Something they simply cannot do.
2. They see Jesus on the shore, but they don’t know that it’s him—they don’t recognize him.
3. When they realize it’s Jesus, Peter, who has no clothes on, quickly puts his clothes on and jumps into the Sea of Tiberias. They are in Galilee, which seems to indicate that the author of this account knew Mark’s account or at least part of the synoptic tradition that has Jesus saying that he will see the disciples again in Galilee.
4. “The disciple whom Jesus loved”—often thought to symbolize the Christian community for which the Gospel was written.
5. Jesus is standing by a “charcoal fire” on the beach. The other place we have seen a charcoal fire was, above, in the first denial of Peter’s. All that denial, all that betrayal, is present in this story.
6. Jesus has fish on the fire, but he asks the disciples to bring some of their miraculous catch to breakfast anyway—share the food. And that’s how they know that it’s Jesus: after he says “Come, have breakfast” none of them ask who he is “for they knew he was the Lord.”
Here, again, is Williams, “On the far side of the resurrection, vocation and forgiveness occur together, always and inseparably.” The disciples are forgiven in the literary details of the story--that is abundantly clear. They are forgiven so that they can go out and do—and that was the part that was missing in the Hebrew Bible. What could they do? Think back to the small ray of hope we had at the end of 2 Kings 25: Jehoiachin is released from prison and “every day of his life he dined in the king's presence.”
So here are these disciples, dining not just in the presence of the king, but with the king, and—most notably—not just eating his food, but bringing their own food to share, which presumably the king eats with them. That alone is significant. What’s different, now, is that they are given something to do—they aren’t just eating with him, but they have a vocation now, and it’s not fishing. Three times, after breakfast, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him. And when Peter answers yes, each time Jesus commissions him. This time there is a COMMISSIONING. And the commissioning, notably, is to leave the land, to go out and to preach. Not to stay at home, not to covet the land. But to preach the good news, to “follow me.”
(Notably present in my thinking on this is also Regina Schwarz's chapter on Land and Identity--see excerpts from it further down the blog, but the whole piece is also on the e-reserve list for the class. When I get a chance--maybe in a few weeks!--to turn this little bit of thought into a full-blown reading, I will definitely cite Schwarz's wonderful argument about the HB's relationship to the land.)
