Hearing the non-violence in a silent departure (John 8:59 and 10:39)

Abstract

The provocative exchanges between Jesus and his interlocutors in John 8 and 10 both climax in the interlocutors rejecting Jesus’s claims and seeking to stone him before tersely describing Jesus’s escape from a premature death: in John 8:59, Jesus hides himself and departs from the temple, whereas in John 10:39, he merely departs. These enigmatic descriptions of departure create “narrative silences.” Considering ancient expectations for violent divine retribution against those who failed to recognize and honor a deity’s manifestation, I argue these “narrative silences” would have provoked an ancient audience to anticipate violent divine judgment. John, however, subverts this expectation. While maintaining that Jesus’s departure from the temple, and, later, from the world, are divine judgment in the form of the removal of the divine presence, John nevertheless presents this judgment as distinctively non-violent. This non-violent divine judgment in turn furthers the Gospel’s aim of convincing the audience to accept the Gospel’s claim that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence.