“Arise, Let Us Leave This Place”: John 14:31b and Pseudo-Epiphanius

Abstract

“Arise, Let Us Leave This Place”: John 14:31b and Pseudo-Epiphanius Michael Heintz John behr, in his recent and magisterial study of John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel,1 numbers, among the compositional aporias that trouble modern readers, John 14:31b: ἐγείρεσθε, ἄγωμεν ἐντεῦθεν (“rise, let us be on our way”; NRSV). Jesus speaks these words at the Last Supper, yet immediately proceeds to continue discoursing for three more chapters (15–17). Despite their apparent oddness to modern readers, the manuscript tradition leaves no indication of early or later editors attempting to correct, omit, transfer, or expand upon these three words; the phrase apparently posed no challenge to their reading or understanding of the text. 2 And yet likely because of its awkwardness (seemingly leading nowhere), it has been omitted in the Roman Catholic Lectionary, where significant portions of John 13–17 make appearance on the Sundays following Easter and form something of a lectio continua during the weekdays (weeks 4–7) of the Easter season.3 A shorter version of the same phrase—ἐγείρεσθε ἄγωμεν—is recorded [End Page 421] by both Mark (14:42) and Matthew (26:46), without variants in either case; in both instances the line is uttered in Gethsemane, as Judas approaches to hand Jesus over to the authorities. In the Synoptics, the line does not pose the same quandary as does its placement in the Johannine narrative. However, in all three instances, the line is spoken in a context in which Judas and his act of betrayal figure prominently. The context of the Johannine narrative is not yet the garden, but Jesus’s supper in the company of his disciples. Having indicated that he is well aware that he will be betrayed, Jesus, signaling to the Beloved Disciple the one who would betray him, hands the morsel (τὸ ψωμίον) to Judas, who takes it (μετὰ τὸ ψωμίον . . . λαβώ;ν). The evangelist indicates that in the very act of reception, Satan entered Judas (John 13:27). Judas’s departure was immediate, and the evangelist adds the detail, “it was night” (ἦν δὲ νύξ; 13:30); this is no mere descriptive aside, but rather a theological commentary (John 1:5; 3:19; Luke 22:53). What amounts to the first sacrilegious communion is substantially an anti-communion: a refusal by Judas of the offer of communion made by the Lord in his gesture of handing Judas the morsel.4 This act is thus effectively a counter-sign: Judas receives the morsel from the Lord and simultaneously intends to hand him over, signaling by this very act his chosen complicity in the satanic rebellion. Judas recapitulates the primal sin of Adam: what was intended as gift is seized and grasped as possession; the communion established, offered, and intended by God is broken only by human choice. The essence of sin is to take as possession what is intended to be received as gift. Adam (here and throughout a synecdoche for the first couple) sought to grasp and to possess what was not and could not be his other than by divine gift. In an Irenaean hermeneutic, Philippians 2 unties the cord knotted in Genesis 3: Christ relinquishes the prerogative of divinity which is properly his, precisely in order to offer it as gift. Both the initiative and the gift are divine. Augustine makes this precise connection with verbal hints at Genesis 3 and Philippians 2 in explaining John 14:31: “Adam had ‘grasped’ the sin when, having been duped, he presumptuously reached out his hand in order unlawfully to seize upon the title of divinity, which was [End Page 422] conferred on the Son of God by nature, not by robbery.”5 Perhaps it is the case that Judas, disheartened that the pomp and promise that attended Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem just a few days earlier seem to have fizzled and petered out into mere idle talk and foot-washing, chose to take matters into his own hands by his collusion with the Jerusalem authorities. In his failure to understand the divine plan, he sought to wrest control of the situation from Jesus, even as he receives, quite disingenuously, the Lord’s offer of communion. There is extant from Christian antiquity a homily attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis...