Beauty and Danger

 Today was the Feast Day of John the Evangelist--whoever they were. 

It's a day to celebrate and honor the writer of the Gospel According to John. We know very little about the person, but we have the text. It has a mixed history. 

It is the most poetic and mystical of the four canonical gospels. The opening is famous for it's imagery and it's cosmic proposal that the Word always existed and became incarnate in Jesus, in whom dwells light and life. It is beautiful. 

This gospel presents Jesus as a self-award, in-control Son of God, in stark contrast to the occasionally afraid Jesus of Mark's gospel. In Mark, Jesus prays for the "this cup" (his suffering and death) to be taken from him. In John's gospel, Jesus says confidently, "Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?" It is the most triumphant Jesus. Which is probably why it gets published individually and used as an evangelism tract. Mark is much shorter, but when you're selling the religion, you probably want to put forward the more marketable version of your guy. 

But the history of the gospel is also heavy. While opening with an echo of Hebrew scripture ("In the beginning"), it also talks about "the Jews" as if the main hero of the tale wasn't also a Jew. There might be some reasons for this, among them being that this gospel was recorded after the Christian sect was breaking away from it's Jewish roots. The Temple was destroyed by this time and Christianity was no longer being seen as a subset of emerging, post-Temple Judaism. This might be all well and good except for some really terrible things. 

It was the Gospel of John that was quoted by people who persecuted and killed Jews on the basis of being "Christ-killers." This is clearly the fault of the people throughout history who read scripture and instead of finding hope and salvation looked for reasons to abuse and kill other humans. I do not believe the writer of John's gospel intended to lead to the Holocaust. 

And yet, here is the consequence of separating Jesus from his people. Putting in Jesus' mouth critical words about "the Jews" led to later readers murdering millions of people. 

We should not read those passages in John lightly. We should not dismiss the consequences of what was written. 

To create a literary work like the Gospel of John in a particular place and time may not be immediately dangerous, but for it to be read outside that place and time creates danger. The beauty of the imagery gets twisted and bloody. 

And this is a weight on me. It is a weight on me as a Christian, for sure. I would not want to lose the beauty that is in John, but neither can I comfortably read some passages anymore. 

Even more, as someone who puts some effort in writing literary works, I feel the weight of my words potentially taking off in directions I would never intend. I realize my lack of control over this. I recognize that any evil done, however small, is the responsibility of the person who commits the evil.

Still, I feel the weight. The responsibility of creating anything is that others bring their own lenses to the work. I want to be open to interpretation. I want no evil to come from it. 

This awareness is part of my paralysis in this pandemic year, because it is not only a pandemic year but a year of heightened racial tensions. As a white person in a society that favors white people, I feel the uncertainty that I can see anything outside of my own privileged way of seeing. Being gay gives me a lens through which I get glimpses, but despite similarities I know it's a different set of biases that I face. 

However beautiful something I create may be, I know I will have blind spots for the potential danger. 

I don't have a solution for this problem, but it's where I end up as I reflect upon the Feast of John the Evangelist.