Advent in John’s Gospel: After Silence, Speech

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Silence in the Deadly Dark

God is not and has never been silent. The Son is the Word from all eternity. There never was a time when God the Father was not speaking God the Son. In God, there is no such thing as silence.

And yet, the children of God endure silence, just as they often endure forms of death and darkness. Last week we considered how, as Fleming Rutledge put it, “Advent begins in the dark.” Similarly, Advent also begins in the silence. Even though John does not write this, perhaps can we say “Word sounds in the silence” just as John wrote “light shines in the darkness” (1:5).

Silence can take many forms. While there is the positive silence of stillness before God, I’m thinking of negative silence: how absence of speech still speaks and wounds. Like the psalmists cry in Psalm 28:1:

    To you, O LORD, I call;
        my rock, be not deaf to me,
    lest, if you be silent to me,
        I become like those who go down to the pit.

Silence from parents can create a gnawing hunger in a child for words of delight. Personally, as I wrote about here, I once voiced concerns about pastoral neglect and abuse to a church elder, and the elder responded by avoiding me for two months. Silence. More neglect. Or I think of the case my wife brought to the judicial courts of our denomination. Months and months of silence, waiting, hopeful yet afraid to hope, aware that the pastor and church we complained about had regular and easy access to the men who received our complaint. Selective silence.

During Advent I can’t help but think of that pastor always repeating his favorite Latin phrase around Christmastime: post tenebras lux. “After darkness light.” What a bitter taste it brings to me now. After being very close with him, his wife, and his family for over 10 years, the silence we received from him when he fired my wife created darkness like we’d never known. Silence from elders who previously pronounced commitment to the care for our souls. Silence from a church that, for almost two years, spoke loud praise for my wife’s ministry. It was a deadly silence, as my wife testified earlier this year. Writing these words causes that silence to settle in my stomach like a large, heavy stone.

So, I need a new favorite Latin phrase.

Having attempted and failed to teach myself Latin a few years ago, I’m resorting to Google. Perhaps this will do: post silentium verbum. “After silence, Word.”

After Silence, Word

The prologue of John introduces many key symbolic terms which will be repeated later in the testimony about Jesus: light, life, glory, truth, Son, believing, world, etc. The one word not repeated as a title is, surprisingly, Word, Logos.

Additionally, every key term has a contrast:

• Light contrasts with darkness.

• Truth contrasts with lies

• Life contrasts with death

• Believing contrasts with unbelieving.

What contrasts with Word? Or perhaps “contrast” isn’t the best comparative term. Maybe “need” is better. People in the dark need light. Those caught in lies need truth. The dead need new life. What need does the Word meet? Silence. We can see this in ministry of the prophet Amos.

In Amos 8:11-12 God promised a coming famine upon his people. Just before this, Amos directed the light of God’s judgment on corruption in Israel: the needy were trampled, the poor were bought and sold, and greed led people to “deal deceitfully with false balances” (8:5).

In this context of injustice God says through Amos,

    “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD,
        “when I will send a famine on the land—
    not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
        but of hearing the words of the LORD.” (Amos 8:11)

God promised a famine of hearing the words of YHWH. As hunger is to bread, and thirst to water, so is silence to words.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus gives “water welling up to eternal life” (4:14), and he is himself the bread of life (6:35). Yet Jesus never says he is the Word. Curious, isn’t it? While Jesus is never called the Word again after 1:1 and 1:14, John shows us the Word which is Jesus through the words of Jesus.

Kevin Vanhoozer observes the relative frequency of the words of Jesus:

“Scholars reckon that about three-quarters of the Fourth Gospel consists of Jesus' sayings, monologues, and dialogues.¹

John doesn’t have to keep referring to Jesus as the Word, as he does with light and life and truth, because it is more effective to show rather than tell. Jesus is the Word of God in everything he does and says. He exegetes the Father (1:18) by becoming flesh, tabernacling among us, and by speaking from the Father who dwells in him (14:10).

The Word of God speaks into the silence. This doesn’t mean eliminating silence, just as Jesus being the Light of the world doesn’t preclude God’s children enduring darkness. God is speaking. Like the bride of Song 5:6, our soul goes out to the Bridegroom when he speaks.

“I opened to my brotherkin; my brotherkin had passed by. My soul went out when he spoke. I sought him but did not find him; I called him, but he answered me not.”²

In the Greek Septuagint, that middle sentence is literally, “my soul went out when his word [logos]”. When our souls reach out after hearing a word from our Beloved and seek him, we sometimes do not find. We call, and he does not answer. Silence. We hunger and thirst for the Word to reveal to us love from “the very heart of the Father” (John 1:18, The Message). We feel like those in Amos 8:12, running to and fro “to seek the word of the LORD, but they shall not find it.”

What do we do when it seems like God is silent? Where does the Word of God still speak in to our silence? This is a Sunday school question with a Sunday school answer, but hopefully made fresh by considering it in light of the Gospel of John.

Sandra Schneiders contends that John’s Gospel must be read symbolically. She uses symbol in a very technical sense. Not as a contrast to literal, but symbol as representation and mediation.

“The task of the symbol is to take that which, by nature, is spiritual or transcendent, and therefore sensibly unavailable in itself, intersubjectively available by giving it a “body,” a sensible form. The human body, in which the person becomes available, is perhaps our best example of symbol in the strong sense. Speech is the symbolization of inner experience. Art symbolizes the beautiful. The church is the symbolic presence of Christ in the world. Most importantly for our purposes, Jesus is the symbol of God, and the Gospel itself the symbol of Jesus. In short, a symbol does not stand for something. It is the “something,” available in sensible expression. Therefore, it is the locus, the place, of revelation and encounter, whether human or divine.”³

Did you notice that line about speech? “Speech is the symbolization of inner experience.” It gives bodily expression to otherwise unavailable interior reality. Just so, Jesus as the Word is the symbol of God, and the Gospel text itself is the symbol of Jesus.

“John intended what he wrote to have the same revelatory function for his readers that the symbolic activity of the earthly Jesus had for the first disciples. In other words, the Fourth Gospel is not simply a record of symbolic revelation but is itself symbolic revelation.”⁴

“The symbolic character of the Gospel text itself is rooted in the incarnation of Jesus.”⁵

Meditating on the Advent of Christ, the Word of God come in human flesh, leads us to meditating on the Word of God enfleshed and inscribed in Scripture.⁶ Survivors meet their Good Shepherd in and through these words, in the inspired text of John which Jesus commissioned as the Good Shepherd.

When we endure silence from God’s people, that doesn’t mean God is silent. Jesus’ invitation to abide in his Word remains (8:31, 15:7). And because Jesus has sent the Spirit, we can continue reading and hearing God’s Word with confident expectation. For the Spirit speaks the Words of Jesus:

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16:13).

Quote from Saint Augustine

After all, as regards those words of his which were necessary for us, when did he ever keep silent? He did not keep silent through the patriarchs, he did not keep silent through the prophets, he did not keep silent through the mouth of his own body. And if he were silent now, he would still be speaking through the scriptures, wouldn’t he? The reader goes to the lectern, but it is Christ who is not silent. The preacher explains the text; if he says what is true, it is Christ speaking. If Christ were silent, I myself wouldn’t be saying all this to you now. Nor has he been keeping silent through your mouths. When you were singing, he was speaking. He’s not silent.⁷

Question

Would you consider reading through the Gospel of John in one sitting this Advent season, prayerfully listening to the Spirit speaking of the Word through the written Word? Perhaps God would even speak through you to those enduring silence, as Jesus prays for those who would believe through the word of other Christians: “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word” (17:20).

1. Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 360.

2. Jay C. Treat, English translation of the Greek text of Song of Songs.

3. Sandra Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Herder & Herder, 2003), p. 70.

4. Schneiders, p. 71.

5. Schneiders, p. 77.

6. “The means by which God communicates his light, life, and love are ultimately related to the embodied person of Jesus Christ: Jesus is the corporeal discourse of the triune God” (Kevin Vanoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 360-361).

7. Augustine, Sermon 17.1 on Psalm 50.