A Tree Grows in Palestine: Figs Among Grapes in Luke 13

My previous post, intended as a brief demonstration of a phenomenological approach to reading the parables, left too much unsaid, and did not exhaust the possibilities of the parabolic elements. We can begin, again, but this time, go a bit further into the richness of phenomenality.

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’ [Luke 13:6-9, NRSV]

13:6  ἔλεγεν δὲ ταύτην τὴν παραβολήν συκῆν εἶχέν τις πεφυτευμένην ἐν τῷ ἀμπελῶνι αὐτοῦ καὶ ἦλθεν ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν αὐτῇ καὶ οὐχ εὗρεν


13:7  εἶπεν δὲ πρὸς τὸν ἀμπελουργόν ἰδοὺ τρία ἔτη ἀφ’ οὗ ἔρχομαι ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν τῇ συκῇ ταύτῃ καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκω ἔκκοψον οὖν αὐτήν ἱνατί καὶ τὴν γῆν καταργεῖ


13:8  ὁ δὲ ἀποκριθεὶς λέγει αὐτῷ κύριε ἄφες αὐτὴν καὶ τοῦτο τὸ ἔτος ἕως ὅτου σκάψω περὶ αὐτὴν καὶ βάλω

13:9  κἂν μὲν ποιήσῃ καρπὸν εἰς τὸ μέλλον εἰ δὲ μή γε ἐκκόψεις αὐτήν

The archeological evidence suggests that in Palestine at the time of Jesus both fig trees and grape vines grew, sometimes together, on terraced slopes. This parable speaks of a single fig tree planted in a man's vineyard. The man comes to the vineyard to gather figs, which he expects to discover on his tree. We learn that he has sought his discovery of the figs on this tree for 3 years, but to no avail. He orders the vineyard-worker to cut down the tree because it wastes the earth, parasitically taking without yielding the man's 'due.' The vineyard-worker asks the man to pardon the tree, to defer its destruction for another year, through which he will till and fertilize the earth. If the tree bears fruit, good; if not, the worker extends an invitation to the man to cut it down at that time.

The previous analysis noted that the man and the gardener/vineyard-worker each embodies a certain state of the self. The immediate context of this parable is the discussion of those who perish seemingly in willy-nilly occurrences, and Jesus's teaching that the deaths do not result from sin, but from horrific aleatory forces. The context runs in confluence with the natural attitude toward human suffering and sin (Luke 13:1-6 and cf. John 9). The man, citing a waste of the soil, accuses the fig tree (this fig tree [ συκῇ ταύτῃ  ]) of denying fruitfulness, and wishes to execute a version of justice, presumably a justice of the earth/soil. Such justice digs its roots in the expectation of reciprocity within a clear economy of exchange. An investment of money, time or figs, expects a predictable, grammatical return. This is the structure of expectation in the natural attitude.

 The natural attitude here also pretends to a certain ecology, taking an interest in the well-being of the earth (soil). The man is heavily invested in the productivity of the land as well: part of his investment must prepare the land to give up its yield every season; but he will cut his losses as he sees fit. The natural attitude here even allows for the protection of time: that the soil is complicit with the man's time, three years of it, three years of unproductive, waste of soil and time. Time and soil must yield in the natural attitude, and the parasitic fig tree, for its betrayal of time and soil, must become 'nothing:' "Cut it down," as the lives under 'Pilate' and the 'tower of Siloam' were cut down. The natural attitude has its own way of restoring balance to nature, and limiting exposure to a poor return.

The vineyard-worker certainly sympathizes with the man's natural attitude, but the man, who presumably did not deposit and sow (cf. Luke 19:12-27 for a topsy-turvy play of the attitudes), knows nothing of a particular way of the soil. The gardener, on the other hand, has his hand in the soil, and experiences the earth and time, and the fig tree's being in time, in a phenomenological attitude. He understands the past, but looks with another kind of expectation of the future with a certain 'hope.' The economy of giving and yielding in the natural attitude collapses, and the fig tree appears as it is in itself, as Argos appears to Odysseus, who collapses time and space that his dog might appear as he is in himself (The Odyssey, Bk. 17; emphasis mine):

As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaeus seeing it, and said:

'Eumaeus, what a noble hound that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?'

Open to the givenness of the young tree, as Odysseus opens upon the essence of his beloved dog, the gardener chooses to nourish the soil (Odysseus nourishes memory, the past made present)---he sees not the depletion of the earth by parasitism, but a transformation the land, that, when nourished (cared for, perhaps even loved?), might feed the tree, so that the tree will flourish, and bear fruit in the next year. The 'gardener' redeems the soil, the fig tree and time, transfiguring them. The man, his patience taxed beyond the economy of his vineyard, closes himself off to the future, which he suffers through the anticipation of figs. He closes himself off to the redemption and transfiguration possible in what is far more visible in the gardener's attitude, whose view of the future anticipates, without anxiety, the bearing of fruit. Anxiety forecloses on hope and a change of heart: metanoia; anxiety forecloses upon a future different than the present.

The possibility of change is 'cut down' in the natural attitude displayed in the parable. Hope, future, faith root in the tilled earth of possibility. Threatened by its very otherness, as figs among grapes, possibility lurks within what is discoverable, visible to some, invisible to others. The man and the gardener are at once particular states of their very selves, or even a particular self in particular moments. The parable offers two ways of being in the world, neither is privileged, though if one were a fig tree, the gardener has the 'better part.' Like Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), the man and the gardener are the same self in different attitudes whose oscillations bear sweet fruit.

The Parables, The Natural Attitude and a Fig Tree that Didn't Do Nothin' to Nobody

My critique of John Caputo's reading of 'sheep and goats' pericope (Matt. 25) centers on his decision to remain in the natural attitude and identify ecclesial power in the economy of exchange of reward and punishment suggested in the parable. Such a reading subverts his theology of the event and the weakness of God, and defies St. Paul's own exploration of the inadequacy of the analogia entis in 1 Corinthians, where Paul derails the univocity of power: "the weakness of God is stronger than human strength" [NAB, 1 Cor. 1:25]. The vacating of power in Paul obviously plays into Caputo's 'weak theology,' yet in the Folly of God and in his Belfast presentation (linked above), Caputo locates the abuse of God and man in the destruction of the gift and of innocence. A paradoxical sovereignty of God serves a weak theology far better than a univocity of power: this thing between God and the creature fares better when the creator of everything is not the master of the world.


 Most, if not all, of the parables, understood as perlocutionary acts, present states of the self rather than states of affairs: they present the event stirring within phenomenological 'selves,' rather than personified binary oppositions, or systematic dualisms, or the strife of good and evil. The parables invite today's readers into the fold of Jesus's interlocutors, even his interloque, the hearer of the parables' call, those engaged and accused by the presentation of the parables. The reader, the one in the position to receive what is given in the parable, remains in freedom, in either the natural or phenomenological attitude; but the parables only 'work' for today's reader in the latter, as the former attitude lets all hell break loose (as Caputo is fond of saying). That sad state of affairs has had its run, and Jesus had vociferously condemned it in accusing those who hold the kingdom of God hostage against man (Matt. 23).


Let the teacher teach. Were Jesus preaching and teaching an economy of retribution, he would have presented no threat to the established order, and the body of his teachings would not have the radical stink about it. But his teachings, especially those within the parables, do indeed cense their aromas in an amorphous version of Jacob's ladder.


A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’ [Luke 13:6-9, NRSV]




The man and the gardener each embodies a certain state of the self. The immediate context of this parable is the discussion of those who perish seemingly in willy-nilly occurrences, and Jesus's teaching that the deaths do not result from sin, but from horrific aleatory forces. The context runs in confluence with the natural attitude toward human suffering and sin (Luke 13:1-6 and cf. John 9). The man, citing a waste of the soil, accuses the fig tree of denying fruitfulness, and wishes to execute a version of justice, presumably a justice of the soil. The natural attitude here even pretends to a certain ecology, taking an interest in the well-being of the land (soil). The natural attitude here even allows for the protection of time: that the soil is complicit with the man's time, three years of it, three years of unproductive, waste of soil and time. Time and soil must yield in the natural attitude, and the parasitic fig tree, for its betrayal of time and soil, must become 'nothing:' "Cut it down," as the lives under 'Pilate' and the 'tower of Siloam' were cut down. The natural attitude has its own way of restoring balance to nature.


The 'gardener,' and we always pay attention to gardens and gardeners in the New Testament, certainly sympathizes with the man's natural attitude, but the man, who presumably did not deposit and sow (cf. Luke 19:12-27 for a topsy-turvy play of the attitudes), knows nothing of the way of the soil. The gardener, on the other hand, has his hand in the soil, and experiences the soil and time in a phenomenological attitude. The economy of giving and yielding in the natural attitude collapses in the gardener's experience, and the fig tree appears as it is in itself. Open to the givenness of the young tree, the gardener chooses to nourish the soil, to transform the land, that it might feed the tree, so that the tree will flourish, and bear fruit in the next year. The gardener redeems the soil, the fig tree and time.


The gardener ain't no phenomenological 'phool', pie-in-the-sky cock-eyed optimist. He is a realist, and will deploy the natural attitude if it turns out that the fig tree is no good, and not destined to bear fruit, even if he is privy to the way of fig trees which perhaps give fruit in the fourth leaf, as the vine gives wine in the fourth leaf. This is a fig tree in a vineyard, after all. Today's reader of the parable sits next to Jesus's interlocutors as the parable unfolds. The man and the gardener are at once states of their very selves. The parable offers two ways of being in the world, neither is privileged, though if one were a fig tree, the gardener has the 'better part.' Like Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), the man and the gardener are the same self in different attitudes whose oscillations bear sweet fruit.

Shinings: A brief note on Manifestations, or Appearances

Levi Bryant's blue cup perhaps best illustrates profane 'local' manifestations of objects. Beginning in the materiality of the
 cup whose essence shines forth from its substance or 'powers' in various contexts, the thing might show itself as itself through the evanescent mode of manifestation. Moreover, Bryant's notion of physical intentionality lends itself to distinguishing the substance and existence of objects that can make an appearance, yet it is distinctly unclear that things that possess 'virtual proper being' need to be existent actualities at all; but to clarify the possible phenomenological dimension of powers and manifestations, we might note that the 'powers' reflect the givenness of things, and the 'manifestations' to their intentionality (in the case of simple objects, their physical intentionality). However, the converse can also be the case, where powers reflect intentionality and manifestations reflect givenness, or better, the degrees of givenness: the latter case might especially highlight the phenomenality of the 'moment' when the thing appearing is potentially a recipient of the other (the crossed gaze).

In this regard, the asymmetrical laterality of the phenomenological moment plays off the phenomenality on either side of the 'moment.' Of course, Levi's general hostility to unbridled phenomenality resists a phenomenological reading of his essentially metaphysical analysis, but if we do not reduce the substance of the thing to its 'manifestations' as he eschews and decries, we need not torture his thesis. Nonetheless, we can agree with him that "the irreducibility of objects to their local manifestations also entails that objects contain within them a reserve or excess."

This very "reserve of excess" inform the dynamics of givenness in phenomenology. This "breaking of the regimes" of the intuition underscores the manner in which some phenomena (all phenomena?) might overwhelm intentionality with their essential uncontainability. These realities in no way disable us from speaking about them, or, certainly experiencing them methodologically within the epoche and reduction. Givenness itself guards against the belittling of objects/things to their local manifestations: but here we must part company from Levi's terminology. the reduction to givenness is beyond substance and powers, beyond metaphysics, or better, otherwise than metaphysics, despite the obvious flirtation with a robust metaphysics in this brief note.

Of Principles and Phenomena

"...that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its "personal" actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there" (E. Husserl,  Ideas I, 44).





Another anthem for phenomenology might be "back to Husserl himself." His 'principle of principles' (as he described above) marks the points of departure for the deployment of the phenomenological method. Anyone wishing to comment coherently on the movements within phenomenology, especially within the 'new' phenomenology, does well to begin in Husserl's governing principle as it opens upon putting experience at hand. One does even better if one states one's own understanding of the principle, and restates it as an interpretation of it.

If I may restate and interpret, the 'principle' admonishes the excursions of method to have faith in the knowledge that what presents itself within the intuition 'writes' itself into consciousness with its 'own hand,' as it were, without or at least prior to any conceptual framework: nothing intercedes for phenomena as they enter consciousness. What is there is the thing itself, unencumbered by a traversal through an extraneous conceptual space that imprints a signature of its having been there before its arrival in the consciousness. Consciousness therefore only needs to traverse itself to lead itself back to the thing itself.

Having a handle on the principle assists in determining if an application of the method has violated it, as, for example,  Dominique Janicaud charges Jean-Luc Marion and others of doing (see his Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn"). I am uncertain if Janicaud is a maximalist Husserlian, as perhaps Eugen Fink seems to be; but if there is something worth protecting in Husserl's thought, something worth keeping from a contamination, it must be the principle itself. Fink himself protects Husserl's project from misunderstanding and at the same time suggests that what awaits the effective phenomenologist (one who deploys the method successfully) is nothing short of phenomenal (as in, 'he played a phenomenal game,' or 'the performance was phenomenal,' or 'it was a phenomenal film'). Nothing short of conversion or transformation awaits over the Husserlian rainbow (see Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938, Yale, 2004; and, of course, Eugen Fink's own Sixth Cartesian Meditation: the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. R. Bruzina, Indiana, 1995).

How ironic then is Marion's work, work accused of violating the principle of principles and lacking 'rigor', which proves the method (a special case of the exception[al] proving the rule), demonstrates how the method really can get at the very possibility of conversion and transformation. What should trouble us more is the principle's not-so-subtle post-Cartesian appeal to certainty, or at least confidence; Marion has rehabilitated both the principle and Descartes in this regard. In any event, nothing in Marion's work, especially The Erotic Phenomenon and In the Self's Place, eludes 'rigor;' in fact, the former work can be viewed as overwrought, and both viewed certainly as vigorous and exhaustive (if not exhausting).

The principle, nonetheless, provides a basis for moving into this new phenomenology of givenness. I have described the maneuver of this graduated method as the phenomenological moment in part to remind me that the method defies causality---the moment is a moment of simultaneity---and in part to remind me to resist the temptation to think the reduction as the result of a sequential process of 'epoche' followed by the 'reduction proper.' Despite Husserlian 'givenness' rooting itself in the mathematical, in the given of geometrical proof, Marion's givenness leads back to the fecundity of such 'originary' givenness and deconstructs it, leading the way to his third reduction.   

Hence, the phenomenological moment is a busy place, whether sonorous or cacophonous. The horizonal element of the principle which sets the limits at which the thing presents itself also sets the tone (the stage?) for the moment itself, where the thing, consciousness, and the horizon intersect upon the 'ground' of the moment, which is none other than a shape-shifting 'self,' or better, shape-shifting 'selves.' At the risk of participating in the seemingly endless talk sometimes construed as a meta-discourse of 'phenomenology', let me remind myself of why the method tends to work in productive and fascinating ways. While phenomenology 'proves' nothing and only points to possibility, its effects can have profound critical implications, especially for the critical approach generally employed in this blog.

The stakes are high: reality itself. The moment of method recreates the world. So long as we dot our "I's" and cross our "gazes" we should be OK and live to commit phenomenology another day. We should also bear in mind that temporal and spatial markers [I underline some of these below] are merely a convention in phenomenology, much like the trope of its presenting itself in the first person singular---all convention, all Darstellung, all stage-craft. All the world's a stage.

The enactment of the method begins as the thing surprises consciousness into a consciousness of 'something.' That consciousness is a consciousness of a self, and that self is a self in the flesh, and that flesh rests in its finitude and immanence. The very boredom (how's that for an electrified term in this business) of the natural attitude, the attitude that accepts the science of reality as, for example, a clockwork (choose a metaphor for the scientific worldview), an acceptance of the clockwork in all its magnificence and awe, breaks off---boredom experiences a disturbance, even astonishment, at a thing presenting itself, appearing in view, within a gaze. What gaze? When did consciousness get a gaze? The thing awakens the gaze resting dormant---waiting to be born---in consciousness---the intention born of the thing.

What next? What happens next is boredom already collapsed upon consciousness's [t]race leading back through itself to the thing that comes into view. The world of the self has just gotten a bit bigger, stretched out by the space cut by the thing itself; the thing births an enlarged self, a self become through a becoming, a turning toward, a conversion to the thing by the thing. The collapse of the natural attitude, boring as such, comprises the epoche which brings into relief what has just collapsed it: the reduction proper and the thing itself. To separate the two into sequential occurrences would be tantamout to tweezing out rhythm and time from pitch and tonality in music. Let's not do it.

Cacophony or symphony? If experience forms the self, then the epistemological problem presents fully formed. "We are our experiences." "We learn through experience." Certainly these are not difficult notions. Truth is, phenomenology, when its not masquerading as its own meta-discourse, happens every day to everybody. We are 'everyday' phenomenologists, just as we are everyday mystics (as Karl Rahner would have it, referring to Christians who otherwise would be nothing at all), who experience something.

It's a place to start, a place for me to remember that I said this and was going someplace with it. Perhaps it is a place to start again, restart, from where I viewed this through a parallax view, or through the Lacanian registers and the role of 'lack.' In a modified version here, Lack constitutes the self in the flesh and its opening upon the immediacy of the thing fulfilling the intuition. The loss/lack within the self experiencing itself (as itself) and the world through the epoche, points to a fall into the reduction, a 'leading back,' which inheres in the growth of consciousness, and therefore recreates it. In the play of the Real (the condition of the absence of intercession for the thing, its immediacy of presentation), the method enacts, in the Imaginary order, something actually going on in the ineffable Real.  Lack is loss, but loss as a space for something to enter, not merely consciousness, but of becoming.

What's In a Name?

Juliet:
Deny thy father and refuse thy name...
...O, be some other name! What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet...
Romeo:
I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized (Romeo and Juliet, II,ii)




The hegemony of the name destroys life and love in Shakespeare's play. The patriarchy of the name game imbues the name with history and the tyranny of lineage, and the death of Juliet and her Romeo. Neither dramatic baptism, nor sacrament can withstand the tragedy of the name, can re-name a given name, can avert the tragedy of the name. In Romeo and Juliet, the ousia of the name is the stuff of tragedy and tragic irony. Re-naming is just not in the stars for these star-crossed lovers.

Hashem.

It's probably time Catholicism takes some responsibility for the name of God, or what's harbored in 'the name.' Hashem is beyond being, beyond the Exodus ontology (Ex. 3:14); Hashem is the event that this name harbors. Judaism has always known this point about the name, and reserves pronouncing the proper name of God for the rarest occasions, when the event harbored in the name is released as the event. Hashem harbors the saturated phenomenon in the name of God, the event of revelation, of God's self-communication, despite the saturation of that self.

Relationality is beyond family lineage. "Hello, we're the Christs; I'm Joseph. This is my wife, Mary, and this is Jesus." Neither is the Trinity about family. "Hello, we're the God: I'm the Father; this is my Son, and this is Ruach." There is not a single happy family in all of Shakespeare; even Prospero and Miranda cannot be said to prosper as a family. Names tend toward ruination; relationalities tend toward life.


God, theos, deus.


What have I accomplished in that list? Hashem...now there's an accomplishment. The tetragrammaton, lovingly substituted by Adonai, is best left as a placeholder for the name. Even 'Jehovah,' the name, the proper name, in itself, forecloses on the event apart from a liturgy of the event. God, theos, deus. These are code for the name or they are nothing. The rabbis tell me that "G-d" is a bizarre concoction, and cannot possibly do the work intended by such a hieroglyphic gesture; some rabbis tell me the gesture is just a 'fad.' If so, it's a long-lived one.


Theos, of course, gives us theism and atheism (and now it seems, even anatheism). Since theos accomplishes little or nothing, I can no longer imagine what 'atheism' and 'theism' are able to accomplish any more. The words seem to me the emptiest of signifiers, and by that conclusion I do not mean to deny their histories, their often violent histories. The words do signify in the past, but their future is dubious. What can the difference be between opposing empty signifiers, because, after all, that is what these terms do best: oppose. Both terms tell tales told by idiots and signify nothing. Even the blood spilled in their historical significations no longer signifies. Such blood is lost in the din of distant sound and fury. Sanguinity laps silently upon desolate shores; oed und leer das Meer.


There is no difference between atheism and theism; zero does equal zero, but that's all. In this blog I have referenced what 'serious theists' and 'serious atheists' think, but now it's time to get serious and call the game what it is: pure extortion. No one is really serious about the empty signifiers they have committed to. There can be no choice, after all, between evidence and phenomena:  they simply do not answer the same question, and the metaphysical blackmail that keeps propping up the choice races to surpass the desolation and bankruptcy of its offspring empty signifiers.


In the distant past when atheism and theism referenced the same onto-theological "God" the battles were joined and the blood invaded the secret shores of being, rendering green seas incarnadine. Now, as the 3rd phenomenological reduction to givenness has concluded metaphysics and has gone beyond that approach to reality, the onto-theology embedded there has also yielded to otherwise than being, leaving theism and atheism ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, mindlessly, purposelessly reaching, tearing, snapping for they know not what. The phenomenological self has once and for all surpassed the constituting Cartesian self whose only abode is solipsism. Oceanic metaphysics has strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel---its own project. Theism's only referent has been shown to have no clothes, and its negation, atheism, not only has no referent, but has lost its opposition. There are no longer any theists or atheists; seriousness has obviated these gamesters. They have been torn from a body of knowledge that no longer sustains them.


As the remnants of the theists and atheists continue to have at each other's empty set, hope rises from a sea of faith.


                      ...the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain

But what hope can this be except a ghostly, spectral hope in a

future yet to come? What solace is there really in the

irrationality of denying the existence of something that does

not exist? Is something so various, so beautiful and so new

as that which is to come really without joy, love, light,

certitude and peace? That something to come, so new,

beautiful and various, haunts memory and imagination. It is

the heart of a heartless world, that which quickens the pure

gift and the pure call,and it calls from a nameless place, a

place that cannot be named.

Discovery at Bethany, Redux

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”

When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

“But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you,and yet you are going back?”

Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world’s light. It is when a person walks at night that they stumble, for they have no light.”

After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.”

His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep.

So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”

Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. “Take away the stone,” he said.

“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”

Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen,and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, many went up from the country to Jerusalem for their ceremonial cleansing before the Passover.They kept looking for Jesus, and as they stood in the temple courts they asked one another, “What do you think? Isn’t he coming to the festival at all?” But the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him. [John 11, NIV]

Jesus discovered that Lazarus had been in the tomb 4 days (John 11:17).

Jesus had just told the disciples that Lazarus was dead, and that he rejoiced for them that he was not there as sickness became death, so that they would believe. At first the disciples thought Jesus was speaking metaphorically about a sleeping Lazarus, so he spoke to them more directly: Lazarus was plain and simply dead. Jesus rejoices not in that death, but in the faith-to-come that Lazarus' death will celebrate. Still, he wept that Lazarus and his sisters suffered, for he loved them (11:5). Joy for some, and mourning for others. 

Such is the face of love in the topsy-turvy world of the 4th gospel. Jesus loved them so much, that he stayed where he was for 2 more days; for Lazarus' illness was not unto death, but that the bright splendor of God will shine through it. Jesus makes use of the day: when it is light, the light will shine forth. Even the gathering mourners connect the death of Lazarus with the work of the day when the man born blind was recreated to see the light of the world (11:27; cf. John 9); light makes the difference between night and day. Darkness is useless, ruined space and time. For Lazarus, night becomes day, the splendor of the day.

In order for John to speak to us through the storied history of readings of his Gospel, we must, as Caputo has convincingly argued, allow scripture (for us, this pericope) to undergo a "methodological transformation into an event" in which the 4th evangelist's voice can make an appearance (Weakness of God, 117; Caputo's emphasis). This twofold transformation identifies the unconditionality of what's brewing in the text---the call---and then gives John's voice presence to us. We allow this voice to appear in all its freedom by freeing it from the layers of exegesis, historical analysis, and especially the onto-theology that has grown around it. This strategy is the epoche, the suspension of what has become the natural attitude toward this text (and others of course). To free our vision from its prejudices and presuppositions, the natural attitude of a strong theology undergoes the phenemenological reduction that bring the event of the pericope into sharp relief (cf, Weakness, 115-17).

The traditional reading of the raising of Lazarus presents a Jesus that deliberately delays his return to Bethany to permit suffering and death only to rebuke it in a demonstration of the divine 'testosterone' (Caputo talks like that). It is a very short journey from such an onto-theology to a harsh theodicy that lays such evils within the divine omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence and renders God's goodness incomprehensible. The text might very well be complicit in such a strong theology, but by bracketing off all that strength, something else wants to get itself done.

Caputo looks to Jesus' tears, as they foreclose on a deliberate delay, which would be 'impossible'. He concludes that Jesus could simply not get there in time. Yet, once we collapse an "all too human love for displaying power," our vision becomes unobstructed (Weakness, 257-58). We see what John is giving voice to: to the very humanity of Jesus in all its fear and suffering. We see that at the moment the word of Lazarus' illness reach Jesus, his beloved friend had already died, unbeknownst to the messenger. Jesus stays across the Jordan (10:40) for 2 (δύο) more days and then returns to Bethany where he discovers that Lazarus was already in the tomb for 4 ( τέσσαρας) days. It apparently takes him 2 days to complete his return (presumably the same 2 days it takes for the word to reach him across the Jordan). Over the six day period between the departure of the word from Bethany to Jesus' return there Lazarus had died, a death which coincides with the delivery of the word of his illness. John has crunched the numbers he has enumerated for us; it was there all the time, but only now visible in the reduction: Jesus knew at the moment of hearing the word of Lazarus' illness that his beloved friend had died; and he shares this sad news with his disciples who at first misunderstand him. In his profound grief for his friend he rejoices in the disciples' faith-to-come; for Lazarus will not stay dead. John's mathematical time forecloses on any calculus of the divine strength to orchestrate a show of its muscle, which flexes enough in the voice of Jesus calling life upon the dead.


John wants us to see the depths of Jesus' humanity here---the generosity of his joy for his disciples and of his grief over the loss of his friend. In 11:35-38, Jesus' tears cause the Judaeans to marvel at his 'love.' Jesus is then moved deeply and then toward the tomb (11:38). The word ἐμβριμώμενος suggests a reaching deep within himself. Such a reaching doubtless informs the 2 days Jesus needs to compose himself before he returns to a place of sadness, which is a place very near a death by stoning (John 10).

The story does not end with death as Jesus told his disciples, yet neither does it end with Lazarus alive. It ends with the prophecy of Caiaphas and the plot to kill Jesus. Despite the faith that the miracle stirs in some, some others still report to Jesus enemies (those who caused him to retreat across the Jordan in the first place). So this is the situation at Bethany: it is a place of great danger and great love; a place of joy and grief and, with the life restored to Lazarus, the acceleration of the way to the Cross. There is no greater love than this: to lay down one's life for a friend. This is the event released at Bethany. To see it clearly, we even have to bracket off all that  'power' and choose the weakness of God. John, given his voice back from a bracketed dogmatic theology he does not know, tells us simply that Jesus loves in the weakness of his tears. 

Love---agape, philos---discovers suffering and mourning within itself. Lazarus discovers the light from the darkness of the tomb as the man born blind finds sight at Siloam. These are short journeys of discovery, as these figures step from darkness into the light. Jesus' own journey to Bethany discovers that love weeps in the face of suffering, and his tears are the tears of love. Jesus wept; God wept. And weeping swept away death, as darkness fades into light. Jesus loves and weeps as we love and weep. And tears melt into prayers for more light. Jesus' prayer is a very public prayer that connects him to the Father and brings the hearers of the prayer to faith. Jesus presents the discovery that love, faith, mourning and suffering entangle the doxa of God. 

Though our old friend Nietzsche looked with contempt upon Christianity, he could sing the very song of darkness, midnight's song, where joy and suffering are of a piece, joy deeper yet than suffering in the eternal morning that quickens the eternal night. The light of the sun is its shining joy as the benighted become enlightened. Midnight awakens from its dream into the ebb and flow of joy and sorrow whose currents flow in a single sea of recurrence. The Mitternachtslied is a very Christian moment for the philologist of Basel when read through Lazarus' eyes, or the eyes of the man born blind. Or if the eyes just can't have it, it is the moment of the very voice of midnight. Midnight accepts joy and suffering in eternity where love encompasses its rhythm with all its syncopation, its unexpected accents on suffering, mourning and joy. This is love. This is metanoia, the event harbored in the raising of Lazarus. 

The movements of bodies undergird the movement of a coming to believe. The disciples with Jesus move with him from Jerusalem to across the Jordan, and then back again across the Jordan to Bethany, where their faith-to-come materializes. Martha and Mary move from where they meet Jesus to where they were staying. First Martha alone meets Jesus on his way to the tomb where she proclaims her faith that he is the Messiah. She returns to Mary to tell her Jesus has come. Mary goes to meet Jesus, and utters the same faith in the Martha's own words ("my brother would not have died").  Mary and Martha move together with Jesus to the tomb where their faith reveals the glory of God. These motions are the grammar of a change of heart, and change of life, a new life in the presence of the human fully alive.

This metanoia recreates the self, reborn like Nicodemus, that other weaver of light and dark. Not a return to the womb, but a womb-ing of the self that finds itself in relation to the givenness of love. From love, Jesus gives Lazarus more time; for Lazarus does not experience resurrection. Resurrection is unto the eternal beatific vision of love itself; but more time is all the eternity we get in this world. Martha knew this all too well; she knew the Resurrection is not for this day, but the last day. She also believed that Jesus was the Resurrection, and that on this day of his return to Bethany, that fact means more of this life. More life, more time---these symbolize the Resurrection-to-come. The symbols of life and time play out among love and suffering, the rhythmic complexity of love, which constitute the calculus of relation with the divine.

The heuristic elements of raising Lazarus call for a hermeneutics that embraces the text as Jesus loves and weeps, as Martha believes, as the disciples believe,  as love punches out its percussive melody, as midnight embraces the rhythm of waking and sleeping, living and dying. Even the day, Jesus' favorite time, the time of doing the work of God, discovers something beyond it. The day cannot contain the event of more life and time, and we cannot remain an older self as the event pulls us into something new. And though we can see in the light of the world, we cannot see into it; yet it sees us in its fullness and we know that we are seen, that we are loved, that we are loved before we are, by a God who loves before he is.