Reforming Toxic Liturgies

Healing Wounds from the Liturgical Calendar in the Gospel of John, Part 3

Photo by Martin Robles on Unsplash

This is Part 3 of a 4-part Advent series on trauma and the liturgical calendar. See Part 1 and Part 2. These are longer posts, and if you skim or skip due to the length, I understand. The problem with reading familiar Bible passages in new ways is, for me at least, it takes a lot of words; hard to condense into a TL;DR. But I hope this series is helping spiritual abuse survivors reflect on how they think about, engage with, and experience the rituals and practices of the liturgical calendar—and most of all the triune God they celebrate—this Advent season.

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The last time my family watched Andrew Peterson‘s Behold the Lamb of God (BTLOG) concert was three years ago. My wife and I had listened to it yearly since college in the mid-2000s, watched their livestream yearly starting in 2016, and saw it live at the Ryman Theatre in 2019 for their twentieth anniversary tour. We even performed some BTLOG songs for our church in the early 2010s. BTLOG was a tradition full of meaning and joy as we gathered each year with friends, introducing many of them to this wonderful Christmas album for the first time.

But not since 2021. Little did we know that a year after that last viewing our lives would be forever changed: unable to afford housing on my income alone after my wife’s church-firing, we moved in with friends 2,500 miles away, and that’s where we were in December, 2022, when we would normally watch BTLOG. But it was impossible to watch, and still is, because of that traumatic season. That music, so emblematic of Advent hope and incarnational new-beginnings, is now like a cozy hoodie that’s been rolled through cow manure and left to dry in the central Californian sun. It might look warm. Nothing damaged the actual garment. But it’s soaked in shit and makes me gag to even open the dresser where it’s been stored away for years.

Now, that’s bad enough, but it still doesn’t quite illustrate what we’re looking at in this series on trauma and the liturgical calendar. To be a more fitting analogy, the story would need to involve some kind of betrayal and systemic interpersonal harm from the fine folk who have put on BTLOG for the past 25+ years. That is definitely not the case with Andrew Peterson and crew. But that association is there for my family in another respect. The small BTLOG church concert my wife and I did was at the home of the pastor who kicked us out of another church ten years later. That pastoral betrayal gets us closer to Tabernacles, the third of four festivals in John we’re exploring this week.

How Jesus Reforms the Legacy of Tabernacles

“The Jewish Festival of Shelters was near” (John 7:2). Shelters, or Tabernacles (cf 1:14), was an eight-day festival, and it spans in John all the way from 7:1-10:21. That’s almost four full chapters, and there’s no way one post can do justice to looking at all of this material through the lens of trauma. I am going to use Karen Guth’s framework for tainted legacies I introduced a few weeks ago. She uses a fourfold scheme for both the nature of a tainted legacy, as well as a reforming response to that legacy. By exploring the reformer typology we will illustrate the elements of tainted legacies. For more explanation of what a tainted legacy is, see Divine Healing for Toxic Religion. We will also need to devote a fair bit of space to background, because, if you’re like me, you’re probably not too familiar with the Jewish background of Tabernacles. As Raymond Brown wisely notes, “To understand what Jesus says in 7:37-38 and later in ch. 8, one must have an intimate knowledge of the celebration of Tabernacles.”¹ We will get to that background detail in a bit.

Truth-Telling

Guth’s proposal for addressing tainted legacies has four elements: truth-telling, possibility of learning, honoring victim’s agency, and reparations. I will use the first, truth-telling, to explore John 7-8, and then the other three as a lens for John 9.

When a good legacy has become intertwined with past and present harm, a crucial aspect of addressing that toxicity is naming it. As John shows us, this doesn’t have to be done directly. Most of us are slow to see and accept the reality of evil within beloved traditions, including victims those traditions. A subversive, symbolic approach, seen in John 7-10, allows survivors the dignity of coming to their own conclusions at their own pace. As with Part 2, this will involve a fair bit of intertextual engagement with the Old Testament, specifically, Zechariah 14.

Zechariah 14 is a key intertext because it explicitly discusses the festival of Tabernacles, and has already been alluded to in John 2:16, where the “marketplace” echoes Zechariah 14:21. Last week I suggested that John has characterized the Ioudaioi (“The Jews”²) to resemble the Egyptians in Exodus. The Tabernacles imagery in John 7-9, filtered through Zechariah 14, brings that out in further detail.

In Zechariah 14:16 the prophet declares that the nations who formerly attacked Jerusalem will convert and go up to Jerusalem each year to observe the festival of Tabernacles. Tabernacles is a fall festival associated with prayer for rain. As Brown observes, “Tabernacles came at the end of September or early October; and if rain fell during this time, it was looked on as assurance of abundant early rains, so necessary for fertile crops the following year…The fountain of waters that overflows from Jerusalem, mentioned above as part of Zechariah’s vision [eg 13:1, 14:8], can be interpreted against the background of abundant rain sent by God during Tabernacles.”³

One foreign nation is singled out in v. 18-19:

“And if the tribe of Egypt should not go up or come, then on these shall be the calamity with which the Lord will strike all the nations, as many as will not go up to keep the feast of tent pitching. This shall be the sin of Egypt and the sin of all the nations, as many as shall not go up to keep the feast of tent pitching.” (LXX, NETS)

Given the recurring exodus typology that comes out emphatically in ch. 6, the mention of Egypt in Zech 14 continues that typology. Egypt must go up to Jerusalem to celebrate Tabernacles. But Tabernacles is a celebration of Israel’s rescue from Egypt. This is highly ironic, and highly suitable for John, who excels in irony.⁴

In light of previous allusions in John 6 connecting the empire of Egypt to the politico-religious empire of the Ioudaioi, I wonder about subtle irony in the Ioudaioi’s presence in Jerusalem for Tabernacles. Like Jesus told his brothers in 7:6-8, the Ioudaioi did not go up to the festival for the right reasons. It is as if they are symbolically like Egypt in Zech 14:18-19. That is, they might be literally present, but their purpose to seize Jesus (7:44) and kill him (7:19) is antithetical to Tabernacles. Once again, the Ioudaioi are more like worldly empire, refusing to live what Tabernacles represents. Instead of humble reliance upon God after rescue from imperial oppression (Deut 16:43), which should have led to joyful care for the vulnerable (Deut 16:14), the Ioudaioi use fear to control people and prevent loss of national safety (John 11:47-48; cf Exodus 1:12). And like the “sin of Egypt,” the sin of the Ioudaioi remains (9:41).

Here is one scholar commenting on these connections (but directly from John to Exodus, not via Zechariah):

“Note in particular how certain major features of the gospel, besides the signs, tend to have parallels in the passage in Exodus. ‘The Jews’ play a highly stylized rôle in the gospel which is quite similar to that of Pharaoh, as the representative of the Egyptians, in the Exodus account; both are consistently represented as opponents of the deity and are characterized by their lack of belief in the signs which the deity performs. Likewise those who believe in Jesus constitute a parallel to the Israelites, who, unlike the Egyptians, believe when they see YHWH's signs (Exod 4 31).⁵

Through this re-imagined portrayal of Tabernacles, where the oppressors of Johannine Christians are likened to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, the corruption of the feast is exposed. The truth about what Tabernacles became is told.

Agency, Learning, and Reparations

I’m going to cover the final three of Guth’s reforming responses collectively: honoring victims’ agency; possibility of learning; and reparations. All three of these elements are present, and powerfully so, in the story of the man born blind in John 9.

Subtly, but clearly for the careful re-reader, John portrays this man as resembling Jesus. “The man effectively stands in for Jesus in combating the opposing dark forces in the Gospel.”⁶ This is profound, all the more so because the narrative of ch. 9 continues all of the themes and images from the Tabernacles narratives of ch. 8-9. Based on John’s narrative framing, ch. 9 happens on the eighth day of Tabernacles. Jesus’ miraculous healing of the man in 9:6-7 enacts in a literal, physical way the symbolism of Tabernacles that Jesus took to himself in 7:38-39 and 8:12: living water and light. These two images come from Zechariah 14, as well as a handful of other OT passages (cf esp Ex 13:20-22; Ezek 47:1-12; also Is 44:1-5; Ezek 36:24-30). It’s worth a few longer quotes from Brown on the way this festival was celebrated:

“During the feast this was dramatized by a solemn ceremony. On each of the seven mornings a procession went down to the fountain of Gihon on the southeast side of the temple hill, the fountain which supplied the waters to the pool of Siloam. There a priest filled a golden pitcher with water, as the choir repeated Isa 12:3: ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.’ Then the procession went up to the Temple through the Water Gate. The accompanying crowds carried the symbols of Tabernacles, namely, in the right hand the lulab, which was a bunch of myrtle and willow twigs tied with palm (a reminiscence of the branches used to construct the huts), and in the left hand the ethrog, which was a lemon or citron serving as a sign of the harvest. They also sang the Hallel psalms (113-118). When they reached the altar of holocausts in front of the Temple, they proceeded around the altar waving the lulabs and singing Ps 118:25. Then the priest went up the ramp to the altar to pour the water into a silver funnel whence it flowed into the ground. On the seventh day there was a sevenfold circumambulation of the altar.”⁷

“In the actual ceremonies of Tabernacles, a they had developed by Jesus’ time, on the first night (and perhaps on the other nights as well) there was a ritual of lighting four golden candlesticks in the Court of the Women. Each of these, according to Mishnah Sukkah 5:2-4, had four golden bowls on top which were reached by ladders. Floating in these bowls were wicks made from the drawers and girdles of the priests; and when they were lit, it is said that all Jerusalem reflected the light that burned in the House of Water Drawing (that part of the Court of the Women through which the water procession passed). In the Gospel scene Jesus stands in this same Court of the Women and proclaims that he is the light, not only of Jerusalem but of the whole world.”⁸

Jesus, in effect, declared that the past faithfulness of God and the future hope of eschatological renewal represented in Tabernacles were fulfilled in himself.⁹ Then, he used literal liquid—spit and well water—to give light to this blind man. Tabernacles, as interpreted through the prophets, also came to fulfillment in this man. Indeed, Jesus told him to go wash in the pool of Siloam, the very same pool from which the Jewish priests gathered water each day of the feast. John tells us that Siloam means “sent,” and by going to Siloam at Jesus’ instruction, John characterizes the man as a sort of apostle.¹⁰

This creates an ironic parallel with ch. 7-8. Jesus is the sent one from God, mentioned twice in the Tabernacle discourses (7:29, 8:42; also all throughout John). As a dark contrast, “the chief priests and the Pharisees sent servants to arrest him” (7:32; see also 1:19, 22, 24; 5:33; 18:24). There is a cosmic battle going on in these chapters between the ones sent by God (Jesus and the blind man) and those sent by the Ioudaioi who are children of the devil (8:44). If that sounds a bit extreme, consider some additional connections between three texts: the blind man and the Ioudaioi in ch. 9; Jesus and the Ioudaioi in ch. 7-8; and Moses, Aaron and the Egyptians in Exodus 1-12.

Echoing YHWH, the I AM

• Exodus 3:14 And God said to Moses, “I am The One Who Is” [egō eimi]. And he said, “Thus shall you say to the sons of Israel, “The One Who Is [egō eimi] has sent [apestalken] me to you.” (LXX, NETS)

• Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” [egō eimi] (8:58; cf 8:24, 28)

• Some said, “He’s the one.” Others were saying, “No, but he looks like him.” He kept saying, [literally] “I am” [egō eimi] (9:9)

Echoing the Signs and Speech of Moses and Aaron

• Moses was instructed to perform signs (sēmeion, Ex 4:8-9), and then complained that “my mouth and my tongue are sluggish” and asked God, “Please, Lord, send [aposteleis] someone else” (Ex 4:10, 13). God said to Moses, “Who placed a mouth on humans? Who makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD [egō eimi]? Now go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say” (4:11).

• Jesus’ healing of the blind man is the sixth sign (sēmeion) in John. But as soon as he performs this sign, he vanishes from the scene, leaving the man by himself. The man displays remarkable speaking ability, resembling Aaron. When God responded to Moses’ complaint about speaking, he said, “Isn’t Aaron the Levite your brother? I know that he can speak well…He will speak to the people for you. He will serve as a mouth for you, and you will serve as God to him” (Ex 4:14, 16).

• Next to Jesus and John the Baptist, this man speaks more than all the other characters in John. Instead of echoing the Baptist’s negation, “I am not the Christ” (egō ouk eimi, 1:20), the man’s self-identification, “I am” (egō eimi, 9:9), echoes the egō eimi of YHWH in Ex 3:14 and and Jesus’ egō eimi in 8:58. Like Aaron speaking for Moses, who served as God to Aaron (Ex 4:16), the healed blind man spoke for Jesus, who was God.

Blindness and Sight

• God said to Moses that he is the only one who “makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or blind” (Ex 4:11). Blindness is associated with absolute darkness in the ninth plague on Egypt in Ex 10:21-23: “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward heaven, and there will be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.’ So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness throughout the land of Egypt for three days. One person could not see another, and for three days they did not move from where they were. Yet all the Israelites had light where they lived.”

• This plague of darkness is the penultimate sign in Exodus (9 of 10), as is the healing of the blind man (6 of 7). Whereas the final plague before the exodus is the killing of the firstborn sons, the final sign in John is the resurrection of Lazarus.¹¹

• The Pharisees claim to be like the Israelites who had light in the midst of darkness: “Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard these things and asked him, ‘We aren't blind too, are we?’” (John 9:40). The healed blind man was instrumental in bringing the authorities into the position of blindness.¹² There too I hear echoes of Moses, the man resembling the prophetic liberator who also brings judgment, just like Jesus in ch. 6-8.

If They Persecuted Me

A final comparison between Jesus and the healed man comes from Jesus’ words to his disciples in ch. 13-17. There are four noteworthy connections.

• First, during the Tabernacles discussion with the Ioudaioi, Jesus refers back to the persecution the Ioudaioi began in ch. 5 (7:19, 23; 5:16). The word for persecute, diōkō, only occurs in John in 5:16 and 15:20. Jesus’ words to the disciples recalls the persecution he has already endured: “Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (15:20).

• Second, what Jesus says about hate refers back to the beginning of the Tabernacles narrative. Speaking to his disciples, Jesus said, “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you…But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they don’t know the one who sent me” (15:18, 21). Speaking to his earthly brothers, Jesus said, “The world cannot hate you, but it does hate me because I testify about it — that its works are evil” (7:7).

• Third and fourth go together: Jesus predicted that “they will ban you from the synagogues” and “anyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God” (16:2). The killing echoes 7:19: “Didn’t Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?” The synagogue ban echoes 9:22 and especially 9:34: “You were born entirely in sin,” [the Ioudaioi] replied, “and are you trying to teach us?” Then they threw him out.”¹³

All that Jesus experienced in the Tabernacles narrative, and all that he predicted his disciples would likewise experience, the healed blind man experienced first. He was the first victim. His was the spiritual abuse story with which John’s audience could identify and say #MeToo. And notably, it was abuse inflicted on Tabernacles.

But all the hatred and persecution and abuse, and the trauma which tainted the festival of Tabernacles, led—through Jesus the new and better Tabernacle of God in human flesh—to a reformation of that tainted legacy. Here we can summarize those other three elements of Guth’s reforming response:

• The healed blind man is given agency and voice on par with Jesus himself.

• Through this man’s story, John’s audience could learn that trauma associated with oppressive imperial liturgy is not the end of their story either.

• The living water and light flowing out of him, the deep spiritual effects of the true hope of Tabernacles, signals deeper change and reformation available in Jesus. Not just for this man, but for the entire household of God.

That deeper reformation is what John 10 is all about. Stay tuned for Christmas Eve and the final post in this series on the Feast of Dedication / Hanukkah.

Quote from Turnbloom, Breen, Lamberger and Seddo

“In the end, the trauma of systemic CPSA¹⁴ has done pervasive damage to the ability of Roman Catholics to place trust in the clergy. “A Pew Research Center report dated 11 June 2019 stated, ‘about eight-in-ten U.S. adults say the recent reports of sexual abuse and misconduct by Catholic priests and bishops reflect ‘ongoing problems that are still happening’ in the Church’” (O’Brien 2020, p. 463). The fact that this lack of trust hinders the ability of liturgical rituals to be effective should be obvious. Liturgical rituals are intended to provocatively offer the love of God through actions that are primarily accomplished by the authority of clergy. If a person cannot trust the clergy, the liturgy simply cannot be uninfluenced by that pain and doubt. While the flashbacks of PTSD can transform liturgical rituals into the real presence of violence, moral injury indicates a deterioration of trust that can stop a liturgical recipient from experiencing the liturgy as the offering of divine love it is intended to be. In other words moral injury can preclude the predisposition necessary to receive the liturgy fruitfully.”¹⁵

Question

For readers who are making it to the end of these long posts, I would love to hear feedback and comments. Thank you!

1. Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 1:326.

2. As mentioned in Part 1, Francis Moloney gives the best description of “The Jews” in John’s Gospel that I’ve come across so far. It’s not an ethnic term; rather, they are “a closed ideological religious system.” Moloney says, “You know, we can all become a closed religious system. A closed religious system that is not open to the ongoing and surprising revelation of God to us in and through Jesus Christ, and the church, and one another, etc. We are all capable of being ‘The Jews.’”

3. Brown, John, 1:326-327.

4. See Paul Duke, Irony in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985).

5. Robert Houston Smith, “Exodus Typology in the Fourth Gospel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81, no. 4 (1962), 341.

6. Colleen Conway, Men and Women in the Fourth Gospel: Gender and Johannine Characterization (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), 135. See also Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, 200-204; David Rensberger, Johannine Faith and Liberating Community, 42; Thomas Brodie, The Gospel according to John: a Literary and Theological Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 353.

7. Brown, John, 1:327

8. Brown, John 1:344.

9. Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 314.

10. Ie “sent” = apestalmenos, from apostellō, from which we get “apostle.”

11. See Houston Smith, “Exodus Typology in the Fourth Gospel,” 336-337.

12. Conway, Men and Women, 135; Leithart, Deep Exegesis, 204. Speaking of tainted legacies, I’m hesitant to use Leithart’s book, Deep Exegesis. It is an excellent study of biblical hermeneutics, focusing on intertextuality and allusions, and throughout the book he uses John 9 as an example of the interpretive principles he explores. However, Leithart is a CREC minister. Ironically, his study of John 9 would likely apply to the experience of many spiritual abuse victims in CREC churches. So, I am referencing this book with caution: do not take that as an endorsement of Leithart or his work as a whole.

13. This is more speculative than other connections explored so far, but it’s interesting to note that Tabernacles, a fall harvest festival, was associated with joy (Deut 16:14), which is picked up in Jubilees 20, where Abraham is said to be the first person on earth to celebrate Tabernacles. In that Jubilees passage, joy/rejoice occur 9x. In light of that, it seems suggestive that John 15 uses the imagery of a grape vine, and then Jesus says, "I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). It’s as if Jesus has pulled together musical notes from what happened on Tabernacles in ch. 7-9 and riffed on them for his disciples in the upper room. This allusion to Jubilees is supported by many scholars and could add more to the element of reparations.

14. Clergy perpetrated sexual abuse.

15. David Farina Turnbloom, Megan Breen, Noah Lamberger and Kate Seddo, “Liturgy in the Shadow of Trauma,” Religions 13(7):583, p. 8.