Not a Failing

By Lewis Donelson

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (NRSV).

The opening of John is the proof text for the primacy of poetry. “In the beginning was the word.” Which means this: words precede everything, including life and us and, syntactically at least, God. In the first beginning and all beginnings since, there will be a poem. When you read it, it is as if you are reading God, for God is this poem. The poem includes more things than God, for through it and in it and by it is everything that is. It is life; it is light; it shines in the darkness. Everything is a poem.

The proof text for the futility of trying to explain a poem is every commentary ever written on John 1:1–5. As in, the word for “word” in Greek is logos, which means not just word but reason, thought, speech, and even choice. Each of these creates a different reading. To translate logos as “word” is to abandon core echoes of the verse. The Greek word for “overcome” in the NRSV’s translation “and the darkness did not overcome it” is katalambanō, which can also mean “understand.” But the best English word for katalambanō is probably “seize.” The seizing could be for the good, as in “understand,” or for the bad, as in “overcome.” English translations usually choose one of these two quite different translations. But in so doing they tame an ambiguity in the poem, “the darkness did not seize it.” Something is lost in trying to make words mean one stable thing. The poem ceases to wander.

Commentaries can do things like this with every word in these verses. But these analyses often read like dead things. Compare worship. A friend makes her way to the lectern, and she reads in her familiar voice, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. All things came into being …” She reads and a poem comes to life. It is rich and calm; its echoes fill the space. It needs no commentary, no sermon. It will create thought, but no thought will ever replace it.

Jesus was and is raised into the words of the gospels. Jesus comes to us in the words he spoke and in the words about him. In John 1:1, read with its echoes, Jesus lives in every word and every word lives in Jesus. And when verses 3 and 4 are added, everything in creation, even life itself, lives in Jesus and arrives to us in words.

Let’s consider a Jesus story, Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). Jesus goes to Sychar and sits by Jacob’s well. But let me interrupt. As I read this story in light of John 1, Jesus is not simply the word “Jesus” in this story. The well, the water, and the Samaritan woman become part of who he is. The story is well known. Jesus says, “Give me a drink.” When the woman responds, she moves the story into the problems of men and women and Samaritans and Jews. They are no longer two people meeting at a well, they are a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman. They belong to the brokenness of public life. Each encumbered in their own way. Jesus comes to us from within the hard conflicts of ancient Palestine. He does not arrive just in the name “Jesus.” He arrives in every word of the story. Jesus follows the lead of the woman and takes the story even further from the well. His response is notoriously complicated, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Each image and clause is puzzling and open to many readings. Perhaps most curious is the tense and mood. “If you knew … he would have.” It is as if Jesus is not really offering her “living water” but is lamenting her failure to know and ask. At this point the character of Jesus is living in a poem and wandering in its echoes.

Jesus then pushes the story even further from Jacob’s well, “the water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Jesus and his words emerge from the spaces of the well and the words of the woman, but he has found his way to John 1. In him is life and creation itself. Water, life, words, and Jesus are all stirred in together. The story is drifting away from the well. The woman may also be living in this poem, but she keeps her wandering closer to home, asking for water she might actually drink. Whenever I read her response, “give me this water so I will never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water,” it seems to me that without her comment this story, this poem, loses its way. Jesus may live in the words of “Jesus” in this story, but he also lives in the words of the woman.

The story, as I am reading it, keeps up this poetic wandering and returning in the exchanges about her husband and who worships where and how. And then, as gospels sometimes do, it tries to calm itself by naming Jesus. “I know the Messiah is coming …”

In most gospel stories Jesus resists the title “Messiah,” but here he embraces it. “I am he, the one speaking to you.” Jesus gathers the poem tight around this claim. The woman says nothing but returns to her city with data and a question. Come and see this person who told me everything I have done. “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” The story ends with a formulaic confession by the Samaritans who “believed because of his word.” It is a bare, almost impoverished, ending to a rich story. The last we hear from the woman is her question, which gathers the story around a wonder and not a claim. She echoes the hesitation we usually see in Jesus and maintains the poetic voice of the story. She speaks the openness of the poem better than does “Jesus” with his “I am he” or the Samaritans who “believe.” She asks the Jesus question: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” There is no Jesus or Jesus story without this question. The whole story is Jesus.

Jesus rose into the words about him, but not just into words. No word can be a word unto itself. And even the tightest poem breaks open to the world. This is part of what makes it a poem. Jesus lives in places other than the words of the gospels. The world of theology opens before us at this point. But I will confine us to a recent poetic confession.

The Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovska writing in the context of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 finds Jesus risen in the fields of war.

In the musty trenches—the day’s un-death—for only a moment. God is born, comes of age, slumbers and is risen Somewhere in a meadow near Luhansk, Amongst the blood and hazel trees.

It is a fragile confession and is almost terrifying in its tenderness. Jesus rising amidst the blood and hazel trees, living in the meadows of the dead. In some ways, every gospel story is written in the shadow of death. Jesus lives in worlds of conflict, Jewish and Samaritan, Rome and its conquered, Russia and Ukraine, every war every time everywhere. Jesus lives in war. But not just in war.

Which brings us to Paul Hooker’s essay “Sightings of the Holy” in this volume of Insights. Paul offers us his own fragile sightings, in a story about searching for the holy man, in his own gentle poems about Mary and her angel, a star that is not the point, the dreams of Hagar, and the wondering magi. Each offered as a maybe. Not a failing. An almost. In his conclusion he speaks from inside his lifelong search.

I love the idea that the Holy surrounds and suffuses us, sighs in the breeze and smiles in the sunset. I love the thought that we float in the amniotic fluid of the Holy. It is not so far away, I think, but peeks through here or there, beneath this bush or behind that rock or wrapped in bands of cloth and laid in a manger.

It is an echo of John 1. In the word, is life. In the word, is everything.

Lewis Donelson is The Ruth A. Campbell Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies. He taught at Austin Seminary from 1983 to 2018. In retirement, he is reading lots of poetry.