by CCW | 11 April 2021 08:00
The week of Easter immerses us in the accounts of the Resurrection just as Holy Week immersed us in the Passion. In both the Gospel of John plays a crucial role as providing the underlying logic to the accounts of both Passion and Resurrection. This is simply to recognize what we see or know through the eyes of John whose Gospel helps to illuminate what belongs to the unity of the Scriptures of the New Testament and in its relation to the Jewish Scriptures; in short, to what is known as the Canon of the Scripture, and by extension to the development of the Creeds. The Bible did not just drop out of the sky. To call it the Word of God does not deny in any way how it has come together in its parts and as a whole through human agency precisely in our engagement with the things which are written and passed on.
It is important to mention this with respect to the Resurrection since the readings both in Easter week and throughout the Easter season show us the way in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. John’s Gospel is particularly helpful in highlighting the unity or balance between ontology and epistemology, how we think about being or reality, and how we think about thought or the forms of knowing.
It is known as the Johannine Comma. It is not about punctuation – itself a most helpful innovation that helps to clarify the relation of phrases and words. The term here refers to a phrase or clause either added to the fifth chapter of I John or removed from it. It is one of the notorious mysteries about the transmission of texts. While not found in the earliest New Testament manuscripts known to us which don’t predate the second and third centuries, it seems to have been received and accepted by some theologians such as Origen. And it appears in much later texts and entered into the later translations such as the King James Version of 1611 which, following Tyndale, drew upon Erasmus’s third critical edition of the Greek New Testament which included it. It doesn’t appear in Luther’s Deustche Bibel since he based his German translation of the New Testament upon Erasmus’s second critical edition of the New Testament which excluded it.
The classical Book(s) of Common Prayer which have used the King James Version for the Epistles and Gospels since 1662 have therefore included this phrase right up until fairly recently. It was in the 1918 Canadian Prayer Book but absent from the 1928 American Prayer Book and quietly disappeared in the 1959/1962 Prayer Book. Some of you are just old enough perhaps to remember this. What is the phrase and what is the controversy?
“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” You did not hear that in today’s Epistle. Nor did you hear “that there are three that bear witness in earth.” You only heard “for there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.”
The controversy is about the doctrine of the Trinity even though the development of that central Christian teaching in no wise depends upon the Johannine Comma. In other words, it is not a proof text, as it were. The general consensus seems to be that it was a later Latin interpolation which found its way into a number of manuscripts but some argue that it was removed in the early 4th century by the Arians in their opposition to the doctrine of the Trinity that “these three one.” Isaac Newton, himself an modern kind of Arian, heterodox and opposed to the Trinity, in the late 17th and early 18th century, was greatly exercised about this text as found in the King James Version and blamed the interpolation upon the Roman Catholic Church. Newton and Samuel Clarke fought unsuccessfully to remove all references to the Trinity from the Prayer Book. It was scholars like Daniel Waterland whose A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed (1723) along with other writings provided a theological and historical argument for the Trinity.
With or without the Johannine Comma, the Epistle reading from 1 John complements the Gospel reading from John 20. With the inclusion of the Johannine Comma Jesus’ references to the Father and the Holy Ghost are made more explicit; but even without its inclusion we are opened out to the mystery of essential life, the life of God, that is being made known to the disciples and to us. The first part of chapter 20 is read at Evening Prayer on Easter Day. It is the story of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb and encountering the Risen Christ who tells her, famously, noli me tangere, “touch me not”. Right after that scene we have this Gospel story of Jesus appearing behind closed doors to the disciples huddled in fear and “show[ing] unto them his hands and his side.” The dramatic point is made even clearer in the Evening Prayer lesson for today that continues this passage with what immediately follows, namely, the story of the so-called “doubting Thomas,” who is told by Christ not only to see but to touch his hands and his side.
This is what I mean by the interplay of ontology and epistemology. The Passion and the Resurrection are all about the essential life of God. That is the reality that is being presented to us. But how we apprehend that reality is in accord with our own faculties of knowing. To Mary Christ says ‘do not touch’; to Thomas he says ‘touch’, see and believe. Luke, too, has Christ run out after two unnamed disciples on the Road to Emmaus. They are fleeing Jerusalem in fear owing to the disaster of the crucifixion which had shattered all their expectations, hopes, and dreams. Jesus enters into conversation with them though “their eyes were holden,” as Luke puts it. After all they had seen him die. They are not expecting him. Yet where there are two there is always a third, something which joins us in our thinking and belongs to the interchange of ideas. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” as Eliot puts it in ‘What the Thunder Said’ in his poem, The Waste Land. He references, inaccurately and wrongly, the Antarctic expedition of Shackelton but the allusion to Emmaus is also clearly indicated. “There is always another one walking beside you/Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded/ I do not know whether a man or a woman/ – But who is that on the other side of you?”
Dostoyevsky, in the Brothers Karamazov, also plays on this idea of the third, “The third is God himself – Providence. He is the third beside us now. Only don’t look for Him, you won’t find him.” It is as if present but not seen by the senses. As with John in this chapter Jesus does two things: he speaks and he acts. He explains the Scriptures, providing them with a way to understand the sufferings of the Christ – speaking about himself in the third person. But then he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them. “Then their eyes were opened.” His action reminds them of the Last Supper. It reveals the essential life of God in the Passion on the very Eve of the Crucifixion. He “was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” Such is Resurrection.
What John shows us has to do with different ways of thinking or knowing about the nature of things. Mary is raised up to another level of understanding. He is telling her not to cling to the things of the past but to know him now in a new way. What is that new way? Precisely his relation to the Father. She is set in motion, transformed from her morning grief and sorrow to be apostle apostolorum, the apostle to the Apostles, sent to proclaim that “I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Here in today’s short pericope, Jesus shows himself in the wounds of his Passion and twice proclaims peace to the disciples before commissioning them and setting them in motion by breathing on them. (This would no doubt be forbidden by the Dept of Public Health). They are empowered to proclaim the forgiveness of sins through the Holy Spirit bestowed upon them by Jesus and they are sent: “as the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” Such things belong to the idea of the Trinity, to the essential life of God himself which is opened out to us in the Passion and the Resurrection.
Thomas wants to know empirically, through sense perception. That is one form of knowing. Here the ontological meets one form of epistemology. The physical and material aspects of reality, of the being of things, is not denied. They are not nothing but neither are they everything. Such are the mysteries of being in many of its forms, not least of which are the deepening mysteries of quantum physics which equally challenge our thinking. In each situation in this remarkable Gospel chapter – Mary, the disciples, Thomas – something is made known to us in ways that correspond to our different capacities to understand, each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold, as it were. Only so can we enter into the mystery of life essential, the essential life of God which is greater than death and sin and evil. Passion and Resurrection draw us into the mystery of God as Trinity with or without the Johannine Comma. Such is the meaning of the witness of “the Spirit, and the water, and the blood.” They witness to Christ’s death on the Cross and to the greater meaning of life essential which has gathered death into itself and changed its meaning.
Fr. David Curry
Octave Day of Easter, 2021
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