John, Gaze, and Self-Referentiality

If Mark's gospel, with it's straightforward narrative drive and it's objective distance, is Hemingway, then John the beloved's gospel is Faulkner:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning" (John1:1-2).  Circular.  Discursive.  Doubling back.  Right from the start.  It's a verse that still confuses the life out of Jehovah's Witnesses when I try to use it as proof that Jesus is not just a demi-god.  (Actually, their verses just drop the capital letters and they turn it back on me.  Amazing what a jot and a tittle can do.)

No, John the beloved sees things just a little bit differently, writes passionately, gives us inside stories, crafts prose that we must soak in before they reach our core.  John's way of writing, however, seems to be only part literary construct.  John certainly has a unique perspective, a heart brimming with love for the world and his Master, but he also seems to be reconstructing the way Christ himself uses language.  Listen to the way the Master himself talks:  "On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" (John 14:20).  Honestly, at times when the disciples scratch their heads, I do too.  There's something bigger here than we're used to dealing with, something akin to the doubling back of "I am who I am."

But John's text never lets us forget that it's a text--yea, a text that's meant to pursuade, that's meant to initiate faith.  This happens in the fourth, post-resurrection appearance that John documents, the story of "doubting Thomas." 

Again, this is a story that Mark wouldn't tell.  He's not an insider first of all, like John, so he doesn't have the goods.  John's gospel at times feels like a tell-all.  We get up close and personal with the disciples in ways that are shockingly human.  And so we see Thomas' brash statement that he needs physical proof, said with such vigor that we hear echoes of Peter in him--Peter who will be reinstated with the mysterious "feed my sheep" in the next chapter.  We're dealing with epiphanies here in John, and to have epiphanies we need before and after.  Thomas' before is gruesome realism:  "Unless I feel those bloody wounds, y'all are cracked.  And he's dead.  Fini."  That's doubt.  Ugly, killing doubt.

And we know that Jesus makes him eat his words.  But maybe not.  Maybe it's encouragement, said with a laugh.  "Okay, smart boy.  I know what you said.  Up this sleeve?  Nothing.  Up this sleeve?  Nothing.  You want to put your fingers through the holes?  You want to see firsthand what a resurrection body is like?  Be the first to try it out!"  I'm not so sure there's not an "I'm willing to help you believe," here. 

But it's the next passage that jumps off the page at us.  In film study and the visual arts, they call it "gaze": when you the viewer, the watcher, realize your participation in the picture.  In visual art it's something that draws attention to the fact that you the viewer are needed to make the meaning of the picture.  It can be as easy as every person in the painting focusing on the critical point of the painting--excepts one person who looks directly at you.  In any case, you the watcher become aware of yourself as watcher. 

I suppose that's a little different than self-referentiality, when authors like Faulkner make us aware that they are constructing the text, that the text we are getting lost in is very much a construct.  But in the Thomas passage we have both.  After Thomas' confession, Jesus makes us aware that we have a stake in this game, that we don't just get to watch and be entertained, but that this scene involves us.  "Because you have seen me, you have believed," he says.  "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."  And the words jump off the page to me, the reader, a participant in this as surely as Thomas was.  I have the choice to demand physical proof, to give over to doubt; I have the choice to make this count in my life, to believe, to buy into a radically altered reality.  And Jesus knows the difficulty of the feat.  Just as surely as he encourages Thomas, offers himself and his humiliation-victory for evidence, he encourages the imagination and paradigm shift this will take for readers throughout the centuries.

And then in the next paragraph, John himself reminds us that this is not objective, that he too has a clear agenda in writing this, one similar to Jesus' words here.  "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

Not very subtle, there; not very literary.  Actually, self-referential and blatant. 

And beautiful, wonderful, life-changing.  How could it be written any other way?  How can one call for the paradigm shift it takes to believe in the resurrection but by story; by first hand, dirty-little-doubting-secret evidence; by direct call to faith that will alter the planet's very course?