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I Am The Light of The World
I Am The Light of The World
J. Gerald Janzen
MacAllister-Petticrew Professor of Old Testament, Emeritus
Christian Theological Seminary
For a summary of recent views, see H. Braun, "Qumran und das Neue
Testament," Theologische Rundschau 28 (1962): 218-20. See also Raymond
E. Brown, The Gospel According to John: i-xii, The Anchor Bible (Garden
City: Doubleday and Company, 1980).
116
7 Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
3
Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1968), 20.
4
Ibid., 98-99.
5
If C. T. R. Hayward is correct in his analysis of the background of ho
logos in John 1:1-2, as rooted ultimately in the ehyeh I ego eimi I Targumic
memra9 of Exodus 3:14, then there is in fact the deepest connection between
*'Word" in this Gospel and the seven "I am" pronouncements. (C. T. R.
Hayward, 'The Holy Name of the God of Moses and the Prologue of St.
John's Gospel," New Testament Studies 25 [1978-79]: 16-32; and Robert
Hayward, Divine Name and Presence: The Memra [Totowa, N.J.: Allanheld,
Osmun, 1981],)
^Wheelwright, 116.
118
"/Arn the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
7
Wheelwright, 110; italics added.
8
As Raymond Brown observes, this reading is supported by the best
Greek manuscripts.
120
"I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
122
"lAm the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
Good Shepherd will lay down his life for the sheep and take it up
again, and that this whole image then is to be understood as receiving
redefinition through that act, two passages come to my mind: first,
Psalm 24:7-10, with its reference to "gates" and "everlasting doors"
whose connotations in regard to the power of death have been so
suggestively explored by Alan Cooper;11 and second, Psalm 118:14—
23, at the heart of which "David" is depicted as returning victorious
from battle to enter the gates of righteousness along with the
righteous (plural)—a psalm appropriated early in Christian circles in
reference to the passion and resurrection of Christ. Whether the
connotations of the Door are correctly identified here, the fact
l2
C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St. John (London: S.P.C.K.,
1958), 392.
13
Brown, 656-57.
124
"lAm the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
Along comes the final editor who decides that he should insert
"additional forms of the Last Discourse." Where to put them? He
decides to put them between "Rise, let us go hence" and the report in
18:1 of their going to cross the valley to a garden. Why put them
there? Why not find some place prior to the end of 14:31? And if he
can find no place there to put them, why not delete the words "rise, let
us go hence" or transpose them so as to follow the end of chapter 17?
Because he "did not want to tamper with this ending"? But with all
due respect, he certainly tampers with the sequence between 14:31
and 18:1, creating what appears to be a humongous non-sequiturl
After such a disturbance of the text before him, why would the final
editor stick at deleting one little clause? I find such explanations lame
in the extreme. They do serve the interests of those scholars who are
engaged in reconstructing the compositional history of this Gospel,
for whom the "awkwardness" of the present text is a tell-tale ragged
"seam" between compositional stages. But there is always the
question of whether the "seam" that is discerned is a compositional
clue or a narrative stratagem. And even where it is clearly an instance
of the former this does not thereby rule out its being also an instance
of the latter. That is to say, if we suppose that the final editor placed
chapters 15-17 between an earlier smooth segue from 14:31 to 18:1,
without excising the end of 14:31, this must mean that the final editor
wanted us to read these chapters as following from that call to "go
hence" but before arriving at the garden. Westcott puts the matter
simply:
14
B. F. Westcott, The Gospel according to St. John (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B.Eerdmans, 1978), 211.
l5
The English word "topic" comes, of course, from the Greek word
topos, "place, location." The medieval phrase loci communes refers,
likewise, to common topics of theological discussion and debate. One
prominent biblical example of the interaction between geographical topoi
and literary/theological topics is the meeting of future bride and groom at a
well. See my essay, "How Can a Man Be Born When He Is Old?
Jacob/Israel in Genesis and the Gospel of John," Encounter 65, no. 4
(Autumn 2004): 323-43.
16
In The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 80, Philip Wheelwright
quotes the following poem by Emily Dickinson as an example of the
"semantic rejuvenation" of words through their "conceptual dislodgement"
from conventional contexts of usage and their embeddedness in new
126
7 Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
contexts: "Essential oils are wrung; / The attar from the rose / Is not
expressed by suns alone, / It is the gift of screws." In passing, one may
wonder whether Dickinson derived the inspiration for this poem from the
following passage by Robert Southey, part of his contribution to Omniana, a
volume of readings which he produced with Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
"Ottar of Roses: In the Historie Generale de l'Empire de Mogul (T. 1, p.
327) compiled by Catrou the Jesuit from Manouchi's papers, this perfume is
said to have been discovered by accident. Nur-Jaham, the favourite wife of
the Mogul Jahan-Guir, among her other luxuries had a small canal of rose
water. As she was walking with the Mogul along its banks, they perceived a
thin film upon the water.. .it was an essential oil made by the heat of the sun.
They were delighted with its exquisite odour, and means were immediately
taken for preparing by art a substance like that which had been thus
fortuitously produced" (Robert Gittings, ed., Omniana or Horae Otiosiores
by Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge [Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press
Ltd., 1969], 291).
With reference to the topic of this paper, one might say that while the
light of the sun is "fortuitously" produced, the Light of the World, as shining
from Gethsemane, is "the gift of screws." As in Dickinson's poem, which
rejuvenates the word "express" by invoking its original meaning, "press
out," the Gospel of John rejuvenates the "expressive" functions of words in
narrating the passage of the incarnate Word through Gethsemane. Austin
Fairer, in commenting on the debate between Rudolf Bultmann and several
German colleagues on the question of "demythologizing" the New
Testament, suggested as an alternative that in the New Testament itself we
are presented, not with the demythologizing, but with the crucifixion of
images. He had in mind specifically the crucifixion, in Jesus's death, of the
image of Messiah as God's means of deliverance. See his essay, "An English
Appreciation," in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans
Werner Bartsch (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 212-23; and
especially his sermon, "Emptying Out the Sense," in A Celebration of Faith
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), 31-35.
If "doing what the Father has commanded" has its supreme instance
in Jesus laying down his life for the sheep (10:11-18), and if Jesus as
the true vine is the supreme instance of being pruned at the hands of
the vinedresser in order to bear much fruit, then the application of that
parable to the disciples in their love for him in chapter 15 makes
14:31 a perfect set-up for what follows.
All of this is by way of asking whether, in 8:12, "I am the
light of the world" does in fact drop out of the blue without any
thematic preparation in the narrative. By now we should expect there
to have been a preparation, and by now it is difficult to miss the
implications of chapter 7. Here the references to "the Christ" mount
up with unusual frequency, and the controversy converges on the
issue of locale: How can a Messiah who is supposed to come from
Bethlehem come from Galilee? What scriptural basis could such a
notion claim?
We may note, parenthetically, that the pericope concerning
the woman taken in adultery appears to have found its way into the
interval between 7:52 and 8:12 very late in the history of the
manuscript transmission of this Gospel. Unlike the question of layers
of compositional history in regard to chapters 15-17, where no
manuscript testifies to an original sequence from 14:31 directly to
15:1, in the present instance the manuscript evidence for a sequence
from 7:52 directly to 8:12 is overwhelming. Even if we wish to take
17
Brown, 656.
128
"I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
And in short order the reader is ushered into the dynastic oracle,
The pronouncement "I am the light of the world" is, then, part and
parcel of the primary theme of John's Gospel: that Jesus is the
Messiah, the Son of God, whose coming, like the announced royal
birth in Isaiah 9, brings light to those who walked in darkness.
That the Messianic theme should contain such a connotation
of light might be taken to reflect the universal significance inherent in
light as an archetypal symbol. As Wheelwright writes, in a vein that is
highly suggestive,
I8
Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, 123.
130
"I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
The prologue that begins with these words, after another 150 lines of
Hammurabi's self-description, draws to a close with these words:
And then follow the laws through which this universal kingship of
Hammurabi is exercised, a kingship imaged at the beginning and the
end in terms of the rising of the sun to light up the land. That kingship
is the human expression of the divine kingship of Marduk. It is clear
that Hammurabi as "the sun of Babylon, who causes light to go forth
over the lands of Sumer and Akkad," is the effulgence of Marduk. For
in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, when the gods proclaim
Marduk as their king, and in so doing "proclaim his fifty names" as
signifying that all divine powers henceforth are concentrated in his
person, they begin by saying,
That this early Semitic imagery of just royal rule as the light of the
sun lies behind Isaiah 9 is suggested by the old poem in 2 Samuel
23:2-7, called by current scholars "The Last Words of David." The
poem reads in part,
19
James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 164-65
(concerning Hammurabi); and 69 (concerning Marduk). One may note
further that in the epilogue to the Code of Hammurabi that king says, in part,
"By the order of Shamash, the great judge of heaven and earth, may my
justice prevail in the land" (178). Shamash is, of course, the sun god.
132
"I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
134
"I Am the Light of the World" (John 8:12)
have identified), writes, "Yet, in the OT light and darkness are not
opposed as principles of good and evil as they are in John; and for
such dualistic opposition the Dead Sea Scrolls offer a far better
parallel to Johannine usage.*'20 To say it again, the diction and the
critical sharpening of terms so characteristic of John may well stand
in some relation to the usage among the community of Qumran. But it
is a question of what is done with that diction; and the answer to that
question, I suggest, lies not in Qumran (let alone the religion of Ahura
Mazda and Ahriman) but in the Old Testament as claimed by John in
support of his presentation of Jesus as Messiah. At one level it is true
that the story of Jesus in the Gospels—and especially in the Fourth
Gospel—gives a new connotation to the universal symbol of light.
And yet, those who "do a double take" on exilic Isaiah in light of that
new connotation may be pardoned for hearing hitherto unperceived
overtones in the fact that die servant who is given as "a covenant to
the people, a light to the nations" (Isa. 42:6; 49:6) is one "who walks
in darkness and has no light, yet trusts in the name of the LORD and
relies upon his God" (Isa. 50:10).
In terms of Wheelwright's typology of metaphors according
to their range of usage, I would suggest that John takes an image of
archetypal range, narrows it almost intolerably by investing it with
connotations that stand the archetypal meanings on their head, and
then offers it back to the world that "God so loved" for universal
reappropriation in its transformed significance, "so that the world
may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you
have loved me" (17:23). Such an appropriation, transformation, and
manifestation is entirely in accord with the universal vision with
which this Gospel begins. It remains to be seen whether we will truly,
effectively, buy into a love that plays such havoc with our treasured
notions of omniscience and omnipotence, or whether, like the persons
in Isaiah 50:11, we prefer to continue to warm ourselves by those
conventional bonfires that we love to light for ourselves.
20
Brown, 340.