By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
The ultimate day, no glorious consummation but the final prostration, bears the weight of a weariness not merely human but liturgical, like incense that suffocates rather than delights. Over Jerusalem hovers the heavy fatigue of the ages, a dust of victims’ skins and the sighs of slow-moving psalms; and its odour no longer persuades of sacrifice, it resembles more the insufferable intimacy of habit.
Within this landscape of ritualistic flamelessness, where the spirit’s hunger is confounded with the skin’s perspiration, He stands. And His voice is neither an arcane whisper, nor a maniacal cry; it is a shriek, like a blade of glass, which ruptures the stuporous piety.
“If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” The invitation does not ask for piety, it does not presuppose faith. It turns towards the dry necessity, the inarticulate cry of the flesh. It is a summons that offends those practiced in the management of the Divine, those trained in the diet of the commandments, those who have metabolised God into a permissible caloric allowance.
And the schism, like a natural reaction of the body, comes instantaneously; not as a philological or theological disagreement, but as a spasm. The multitude, an unrefined, thirsty body, feels something; it knows not what it is, but the truth has never presupposed epistemology: “This is in truth the Prophet.”
The others, the representatives of certified understanding, close their ears. His voice, for them, is not water, but a soured wine that threatens to corrode the steel of their authority. Their word, their reaction, comes not with enquiry but with a silent panic; Scripture as a wall, not an opening: “For doth the Christ come out of Galilee?” Localism as a theological argument, geography as a muzzle for God. Christ does not fit within their prophecies, therefore He does not exist.
The attendants who had been dispatched return with a phrase that the edifice of the rulers cannot contain: “Never man spake thus.” They do not bring a report, they bring disquiet. His voice possesses something that dissolves the category of the human.
And the authorities, naked before their own inadequacy, respond as only authority knows how: with contempt. “Are ye also deceived?” To question is a sickness. The multitude, being ignorant, is condemned: “but this multitude which knoweth not the law are accursed.” Their ignorance becomes sin; their need, the cause of a curse. The Law, a tool of demarcation; God, a supplement to their own scholastic sufficiency.
And amidst them, with the diffidence of the night, the voice of Nicodemus. He does not confess, he does not contend. He only reminds, with legal tact and subterranean irony, that even their own rules have limits: “Doth our law judge the man, except it first hear from him, and know what he doeth?” As Saint John Chrysostom observes,[3] Nicodemus strips them bare: they are the true transgressors, they trample upon their Law without a hearing.
The response, a shameless insult: “Art thou also of Galilee?” Argument has perished; identity suffices for refutation. They bid him to investigate, at the very moment when investigation itself has been supplanted by prejudices attired in theological vestments.
And He, unbound by geographies, annuls the narrowness of place with a phrase that admits no borders: “I am the light of the world.” Not of Zion, nor of the holy feasts, but of the world. The phrase, as Stergios Sakkos notes,[4] reflects the memory of the great lamps of the Feast of Tabernacles which had just been extinguished. It is no longer a matter of place but of person. The light is not explained, it is not substantiated; it simply illuminates. “he that followeth me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.” The light becomes a condition of being, the silent promise of a vision not offered to the static.
And then comes the consummation of their bewilderment, the laughter of the darkness: “Thou bearest witness of thyself; thy witness is not true” (John 8:13). They demand proof from the light itself that it gives light. The aphasia of the spirit, the automatic suspicion of the dead towards any presence that does not fit their protocol.
Thus the schism remains; an abyss between thirst and formula, between flux and analysis. The thirsty “accursed” can smell the rain, whilst the masters of prognosis die of thirst, clutching in their hands the most precise map of the drought. The light, indifferent to their proficiencies, continues to shine. And the water, it shall not spring from the well-catalogued interpretation, but from a side opened, with blood and water; to irrigate the earth that the scribes had long since declared a barren cemetery.
[3] John Chrysostom, “Ta Heuriskomena Panta” [The Complete Works], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 59 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1862), col. 288.
[4] Stergios N. Sakkos, Ermeneia Euaggelikon Perikopon [Interpretation of Gospel Passages], 3rd ed. (Thessaloniki: 1999), 93-94.
