Behold! The Man!

            You think you know the stories of the Gospels like the back of your hand, and then they reach out and slap your face.  This hit me this afternoon:

            First, some backstory.  I love the way N. T. Wright understands John’s Gospel.  Wright sees John expertly weaving several themes together.  So, the attentive reader will see that John is more consciously concerned with Passover than the other Gospels.  He is concerned with the Temple and the presence of God.  And He is concerned with new creation. 

            Wright and others think that those last two are closely intertwined.  The argument goes something like this:  in Genesis 1-2, God created the heavens and the earth as a sort of Temple for Himself, a dwelling where He could live in the midst of His beloved creation, humans.  Ever since the arrangement was torn asunder by the incident in Eden (Genesis 3), God has been working towards the ultimate renewal of the arrangement.  (Cf. Revelation 21-22, with God’s declarations that the dwelling of God is now with men.)

            So, Wright says, look at what John is doing:  John 1 begins with obvious echoes of Genesis 1 with its, “In the beginning.” And John 1 anticipates the dwelling of God with man in the Word made flesh (John 1:14).  There is a progression of six major events (the first two of which are labeled ‘signs’):  the wedding at Cana, the healing of an official’s son, a healing at the pool of Bethesda, feeding of 5,000, healing of a man born blind, and raising of Lazarus.  Then, John makes a pretty broad point that Jesus died on a Friday, or, in Jewish reckoning, the sixth day.

            Sixth day, culmination of creation, creation of Adam and Eve, death of Jesus—and here’s my brain blast for the day—Pilate stands up and declares of Jesus, “Behold! The man!”  But the Greek might be better rendered, “Behold!  The human!”  In Jesus, battered, torn, condemned, and dying, behold! Humanity!  That’s our death sentence He’s standing under there.  But, behold! The Human!” Here’s the one who by taking the whole race’s death sentence into Himself is renewing the race and re-opening a garden for humanity.  (Notice that John’s the one who tells us Jesus’ tomb was in a garden and that Mary mistook the risen Jesus for a gardener.)

            “Behold! The man!”  John loves irony.  He loves to show us God’s enemies being turned into stooges advancing God’s goals.  John tells us about Caiaphas announcing that it was better for one man to die for the nation than the whole nation dying.  (Snicker.) Do you think he lived to regret saying that when the first Christians began preaching in Jerusalem?  And John tells us about Pilate’s “Behold! The man!”  Here’s the curse and the hope of the race in one.  Here is the pinnacle of God’s creation being renewed and becoming the agents of God’s ongoing act of renewal until all things are brought under Christ’s feet.

            Maybe you saw all that before.  But it slapped me in the face at lunch today.