2 Easter Sunday Cycle C April 27, 2025
Acts 5:27-32 Psalm 150
Revelation 1:4-8 John 20:19-31
I would like to highlight the rhetorical purposes of the Gospel of John. We may have a pejorative view of the word rhetoric; it seems to be limited to using shameless techniques to manipulate for purposes of politics or for the purpose of trying to sell something or to dupe people into doing something bad for manipulative self-serving motives.
Rhetoric more broadly can be understood as the purposeful use of language products such as speech, writing, and body language and ceremonial actions to persuade people about recommended values.
While this is called Doubting Thomas Sunday, the punchline of the Doubting Thomas pericope highlights the entire rhetorical purpose of John's Gospel: These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
The very word belief or faith in New Testament Greek, pistos, expresses the goal of rhetoric in Aristotles work of the same name, the goal of rhetoric is persuasion. Being persuaded about one's highest value is the essential meaning of faith or belief. Pistos, the New Testament Greek word for belief or faith, is also the Classical Greek word for persuasion. The notion of belief as being persuaded is retained in the New Testament use of the same Greek word.
It is not far fetched to suggest the rhetorical purposes of John's Gospel for a couple of reasons. The writer states a very self conscious writing purpose; this is written to persuade or to bring the readers and listeners to faith or belief. Since it was consciously composed and edited by an educated and literate writer or writers, one assumes that such writers knew the literature of their period which was available from Homer, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle to Virgil to Cicero as well as the Hebrew Scriptures, yes, but read in the Greek translation, the Septuagint. Further, John's Gospel is concerned with some basic concerns of rhetoric. Rhetoric has to do with the purposeful use of language. John's Gospel begins with language: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And everything came into being by the Word. And the Word was made flesh and live with us.
This is an obvious insight about having language. Language is the presumption that occurs with seeing, knowing, feeling, and consciousness itself. You say a baby does not know language; but a baby is born into an environment that is already pre-coded by the language users who preceded the baby. The Bible requires an assumption about God, namely, that God is a language user, as God is seen as using speech to create the world. The Word being made flesh expresses a most basic insight, namely that we cannot help but anthropomorphize. We are limited to human experiences so we assume that everything and everyone is in some way like "human beings." So we use metaphor and analogy to even name God.
The Greek word for Word in John's Gospel is logos and it means language plus being the structuring and organizing first principle of existence. And the Logos has Word products. It has speech acts, writing or textual products, and Logos also constitutes our body language in how we act.
John's Gospel deals with each of these Word products of Logos. Jesus said, "My rhema, my speech acts, my spoken words are spirit and they are life." The Gospels all assume the life of an actual Jesus who produced speech acts or teaching that somehow became transmitted in the traces of oral traditions. The Gospel writers as well as Paul believed that they had the mind of Christ and so they spoke in the name of Christ, believing that such preaching was a channeling of Christly values for their communities. My words are spirit. Spirit is a metaphor for wind or breath, signifying an invisible but affecting reality. The words of Jesus are the inside job of spirit which can change and reconstitute our interior beings so that we can act out in Christly deeds.
How does John's Gospel present body language deeds? The Greek word is ergon or works. Good body language in John's Gospel is living a fruitful life whereby one's deeds match up with the spirit words of Jesus which gives birth to a repenting life on the path of perfectability. One of the main works as stated in John, is in fact, to work at belief in Christ. "This is the work of God, that you believe in the One who God sent." God as language user, does work within us, to bring us to belief and persuasion about the Jesus, the Godly Messenger.
There is also a Johannine nuance to ordinary work and the different and unique work of Jesus. The works or ergon of Jesus in John are called signs, semion. This is a very rhetorical term, the same Greek word from which we get the discipline of Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their use in interpretation. The Gospel of John presents the works of Jesus as Signs, as a way to designate his singular uniqueness in being the value setter for the associations of people who came to gather with an identity formed by the Risen Christ in their presence around a banquet table with people committed to living with peace and forgiveness.
And then there is another product of Logos, graphe, that is Scripture, or written text. Jesus of Nazareth was gone and could not be bodily seen. The Son of Man did not yet come in the clouds. The Day of the Lord, the parousia did not happen. How could the association of followers of Jesus be institutionalized for duration and stabilit in the meantime? Like the Jews had with their Scriptures, the followers of Jesus needed a technology of memory to make "visible" the words of remembrance about Jesus. And so the Johannine writer shamelessly promotes his own text. In the beginning was the Word, the Word became flesh, but the Word also became a Johannine text to provide a stable institutionally more permanent status for a community that had to accept that the delay of the Day of the Lord was the normal condition, and the memories had to be maintained and preserve. Text is a way of giving objective meaning a duration in time. The writer of John believed that the text about Jesus would be manifestations of the logos and rhema, the Word of Christ, that would continue to do an inside job on the readers and listeners and bring many people to belief in Jesus as Christ, and Son of God, uniquely appreciated by those of the banqueting Christ associations.
What does Scripture and writing not guarantee? Even though it is a visible and objective technology of memory, writing does not guarantee precise agreement by everyone about the meanings of Scripture. In fact, the history of Scripture readers proves that there seems to be almost as many meanings as there are readers.
What this means is that we should not be dogmatic about Scripture meanings and Creedal statements. We should appreciate their role as significant abbreviations of the profound Logos or Word of God. This profound Logos poetically understood is the Christ who is all and in all, and who affirms the unique Christ experience in everyone by the appreciation of the differences in time of new experiences by many new people.
And the significant point of the doubting Thomas story is that people who did not walk with Jesus, people who did not have post-resurrection interactive experiences with the Risen Christ, people who were not caught up in a Pauline third heaven experience, still have valid, blessed, and affirmed experiences of the Risen Christ, because the Logos, the always already Word of God, whom we confess as the great prior Language User is always doing an inside job within us. The question then is not whether we have word or language; the Gospel question is whether we are learning to articulate the great Word Phenomenon with the fruitful works of the body language deeds of love, mercy, forgiveness, and justice. Amen.
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