The Gospel passage for the Wednesday of the Fourth week of Lent, John 5:17-30, seems on first reading to be, like so much of John, ethereal and other-worldly. It might be that as well, but it is one of the most down-to-earth passages in the Gospels. Some years ago the British New Testament scholar C.H. Dodd argued that the imagery arose from the ancient understanding of father-son relationships.  Cornelia Horn and I utilized Dodd’s insight in our recent book, “Let the Little Children Come to Me”: Childhood and Children in Early Christianity. I cite from pages 53-54 of our book, including the footnotes which are found there:

“The idea of the son’s dependence upon the father for what he knows, his obedience to the father’s will, and the response given to the son as being the equivalent of the response given to the father, all come together again in John 5:19-46 (cf. also John 6:35-51). The will of Jesus is equivalent to that of his father because the father’s authority is in the son. What Jesus knows, he has learned from his father. Charles H. Dodd has an interesting take on this passage:

There is a parable about a son learning his trade by watching his father at work: “A son can do nothing on his own account, but only what he sees his father doing. What the father does, the son does in the same manner. For the father loves his son and shows him everything that he does himself” (all the secrets of the craft). It is perhaps not too bold to find here a reminiscence of the family workshop at Nazareth. There Jesus learned to be a “carpenter.”[1]

Dodd saw the image as one taken from daily life, one in which the son learned his craft or trade from the father: “basically, this is a picture from daily life, but John, after his manner, has made use of it to enforce a theological point.”[2] Yet we might argue that the force of the theological point rises from its indebtedness to daily life, that Jesus’ sonship is explicable precisely because it makes sense of spiritual sonship by means of the images of daily life.

            Indeed, in all of the passages from the Gospels certain themes emerge: God’s son must be obedient to the will of the father, he cannot be a wayward son and be a true child of God at the same time; he must make known the father and so model himself on the father; his task, his work, is that of the father, and so he is the student of the father; he acts only on the authority of the father. In all this, images of daily life emerge; Jesus is God’s son because he does the work of the father, just like the child of any father in the ancient world was expected to do.”

            In all of these ways Jesus models for us, from the nitty-gritty images of daily life, the requirements of the spiritual life. “I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me” (John 5:30). As children of God, we, too, have the model to follow: the Son who does the will of the Father.

John W. Martens

 

 

[1] Charles H. Dodd, The Founder of Christianity (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1970), 120. The Scripture quotation is from John 5:19-20.

[2]  Dodd, The Founder of Christianity, 179, n. 4.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.