John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination

Introduction

1 = Introduction In an essay entitled “Psalm Eight,” the novelist Marilynne Robinson focuses on the words Jesus greets Mary Magdalene with on the morning of his resurrection . Mary, in John’s account, has come to the tomb while it is still dark and found the stone blocking its entrance rolled away. She runs and tells two of the disciples, who hurry to the place, explore the empty tomb, and then return to their homes. Mary, who has followed along, is left alone, standing outside the tomb and weeping. When she senses someone behind her, she turns and sees Jesus but does not recognize him, taking him for the gardener. “Woman, why are you weeping?” (20:15),1 he says. Recalling that phrase from a childhood sermon, Robinson returns to it in this essay, struck by a sense that the “words in some exceptional sense [were] addressed precisely to me.”2 Why did Jesus approach Mary with such deference? she asks. Why, in this moment of almost inexplicable glory, would he take the time to quietly tease her into awareness? Hearing the words as if they were also addressed to her across an almost unimaginable distance, Robinson writes in order to make out their meaning. What I argue in this study is that Robinson’s response to the Gospel is not unique. John writes in order to draw readers into a confrontation with the words of Jesus, structuring his Gospel so that the reader is drawn deeper and deeper into the struggle to make out the meaning of his rich, enigmatic words. What Jesus says is both strikingly simple—“I am life”—and almost impossible to immediately take in. He knows this and accompanies this claim with a series of invitations, phrased to give those who hear him a way to imagine and think through the implications of his words. “I am life,” he says. “Come to me and rest.” “I am life—don’t cling to me.” Jesus forces 2 John in the Company of Poets those who hear his words to work them out themselves. As I see it, John does not so much talk us into believing as set up spaces where the words and illustrations of Jesus address us, drawing us into the struggle to taste and see and understand. John writes at the close of his Gospel that he has drawn into sequence some of the “signs” that Jesus performed precisely for this purpose . Jesus said and did many things, he writes, “but these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (20:31). What I offer here is a literary reading of the Gospel, paying particular attention to the way John’s structural patterns, chiming repetitions, and narrative interventions draw the reader into an engagement with Jesus’ elusive but down-to-earth descriptions of himself. As I unfold the way John sets up opportunities for the words Jesus uses to address us, I turn at regular intervals to the work of some twenty poets who dramatize what hearing his words looks like. Poets are our best readers, and it is no surprise that each of them responds in a similar way—hearing themselves addressed, they each work out, through their own experiences, ways of approaching and considering his words. What we find in poems, Wallace Stevens writes, is “the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice,” and as we follow these various minds pondering, considering, leaping forward, or coming to a halt, we see dramatized the sort of work to which John’s readers are called.3 Following along as these poets imagine what it would mean to eat the flesh of Jesus or drink his blood, we gain access to a way of thinking everywhere called for by the text but not fully articulated in exegesis alone. To illustrate this thinking, I draw mainly from poetry I regularly teach and write about—twentiethcentury and twenty-first-century British and American poetry, with a few well-known selections from crucial, earlier writers—but my approach here is not limited to recent poetry. It is simply the work that was most available to me—a sort of second tongue—as I searched for ways to unfold the inner work to which John’s language seemed everywhere to be calling me.4 It is this sort of reading that Robinson performs when she returns to Jesus’ words...