John and his Mother-Woman - an exegetical poem

Coptic icon of the Dormition of Our Lady

On 29 April 2012 09:09,
Dear Father Donald, 
Of course you can use the poem - if you think it will be of interest to your readers.
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fr Edward O.P.                                                              + + +
 

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From: Fr. Edward,
Dear Father Donald.

We would like to have this poem.
I used a book which had belonged to David - and which I had been
looking for over a long period - F.-M. Braun O.P., Jean le théologian
(Études Bibliques 1959). I could tell that he had read it.
I think that you might be interested in it.
The writer was the Confessor to King Baudouin of Belgium, after a long
period teaching at Fribourg.

. . .

Blessings in Domino,

fr Edward O.P.

John and his Mother-Woman - an exegetical poem

A book is a survey linking big moments.

Were it to represent the whole, or seek to,

its length would dissuade from reading.

The lecturer gains success by restricting himself to seeming significant correlates;

the whole woof and warp of history fails in great lengths;

few minds could bear it to pose a problematic:

how is it possible to increase the clarity

without fictionizing the narrative?

I sought this for the Apocalypse of Saint John:

how to dissolve the patina of pastness

and let reveal the actions in themselves.

But note the order and the circumstance.

Thirty years lay between the Apocalypse and the Gospel.

The need of fidelity to what he saw and what he heard

interposed a proto-ecclesial reality to which he must be passive.[1]

He must be obedient to a mandate and its letter of the Lord

as his inspired moment goes from word to word.

Hence the treatment of the Asian churches:

the viewpoint was divine

to which he must make himself divine.

Mirjam was known to him personally and most intimately for many years.

He must see her now as transfixed by God to her action sequence:

"the Woman" with a Son,[2] and then with many other children.[3]

Satan and the Beast were evil's reality

expanded from within the evil in the normally invisible;

simple characters, their structures broken

by ugly patternings left by twisted order

expressing their inner pain in violence and threat.

John was shown so much more than natural eye or ear

could contemplate.

Much had appeared already in Daniel's view.

They treated their victims as playthings of no worth

- projections in the sameness of themselves.

We could blame a theatre of the absurd,

but violence and contempt,

Impulse driven and consented to.

From beginning to end,

from alpha- to omega-related

all in a transhuman mode

when seen by human eyes

and heard by human ears.

Held to his Patmos vision[4]

John could only describe

but not deviate

as special member of the Apostle's college,

the others being dead,

Their living charism passed on - the Church must hear him out

and grasp its inner inspiration and its form.

After the Arc of the Covenant[5]

Mirjam appears in a mode historical and exalted,

totally devoted to soteriology - she its great agent,

showing her great strength by intermingling with the persons and the forms

as a great action in a higher mode

of what was lived out by Ephesus and nearby,

and in John's presence.

The Gospel's presentation of the youthful, energetic John

was re-discovered by him and displayed:

the delicatest ambiguity with Peter,

the badly prompted impulse of his mother to gain him

glory unintended in that mode.

How exigent were the Lord's instructions to the Churches:

who could conform to those demands?

But what had brought John to Asia with its multi-centred life

both gnostic and gnosticising[6];

part Gospel-holding,

but later filled with half- and quarter-converted,

seeking (and finding) local notoriety in numerous locales:

predominantly Greek, with philosophers too of Ammonios Saccos type.

Braun, our guide, gives the scene in a final "Dossier",

offered in trails of evidence, fragments suggestive of a paideia

Imperfectly compiled, but all too late to give the original contact.

We suspect some person familiar with the many schools and private lecturers,

committed to the faith yet open to the pagan Greeks and others,

a bulwark of protection to John's domiciling of Mirjam and her private-to-John Assumption. 

From 48-70 returned from Jerusalem

and preaching a rich Gospel

deepened by reflection and experience,

shaking the pieces of a kaleidoscope of incompleteness,

trying to navigate an incoherent man

into a new religion whose roots he knew much better !

After a twenty-year mission undocumented

our guide supposes an oil-boiling in Rome from which he emerged intact,

then exile to Patmos.

Then thirty years more

with the breaking out from within

of "the disciple whom Jesus loved".

Finally those early memories

matured in long reflection

and structurally set into his gospel

preceded by an anti-Marcionite prologue

where the whole story's told with charity.

Our guide accepts a burial at Ephesus

in the basilica whose basic stones remain.

Justinian was involved in the basilica's building.

The glory's disappeared.

Their adjunct remains - Mirjam's house -

visited  by a discerning line of pilgrims:

not scandalised by the austerity-marks of centuries

or its bare-rock structure,

but drawn by its full honesty.

Fr. Edward OP 
Stykkishólmur

21-25 April 2012

                             

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[1] Hence the bad Greek noted by F.-M. Braun O.P.,  Jean le théologian et son évangile dans l'Église ancienne  (Études Bibliques, Paris 1959), pp.50-52. But "The poverty of this style by no means excludes sumptuous effects" (p.52). Whilst his Gospel  allowed him to exercise considerable freedom in the style, in the Apocalypse he was trying to reproduce the nuanced styling of what was presented to him in its exact words, all as an ecclesial task.

[2] Apoc 12,2 5 13.

[3] Apoc 12, 17.

[4]  Braun quotes Tertullian (op. cit. p.341 and n.3): he reports "for the first time , that John was taken to Rome under Domitian, and that the torturers there plunged him into a container [chaudière] full of boiling oil. He came out unharmed by this experience  and was then taken to the island of Patmos."

[5] In the last verse of ch.11, immediately preceding  the appearance of "the Woman".

[6] Two words paired by Braun, intended as a sumnmary.