What are we after?

 

What are you looking for?  We were reminded on Sunday that, in John’s Gospel, these are Jesus’ first words: ti zeteite (John 1.38).  What are you after?  Do you know what you want?  Would you recognise it if you found it?

Perhaps the Gospel would be differently encountered not simply as a section of the Bible, nor as a particular biographical sketch, nor as a distinctive theological treatise, but as a separate epic poem entitled What are you looking for?

Towards the death-resurrection climax of the poem the words re-echo.  First those who arrest Jesus and then Mary at the empty tomb are asked Who are you looking for?  This is tina zetite (who rather than what) and then tina zeties (singular rather than plural).

Even at the climax, looking for a rebel to detain rather than for bread, life and light, or for a dead body to anoint rather than for truth, vine and way?

Perhaps I am reading too much into this - certainly the several commentaries on John which have survived my recent retirement down-sizing purge don’t highlight this.

But John the poem-writer had just had John the baptiser say he did not know Jesus until he found him Spirit-touched and Spirit-touching (John 1.34).  Short of that experience, every Gospel-poem moment is charged with Can you begin to know what you might be encountering here?

Meanwhile, here are the Red Arrows practicing over Lincoln - they’ve been particularly active over the last couple of days.

And with it, deep sadness today learning that Traidcraft is going into administration.  My wife Deborah had been active in it all the way from its beginning in 1979 (when she was an undergraduate), attentive to its restructuring and hopes forty years later in 2018/19 (towards the end of her life).

Covid and the subsequent economic climate, the most recent surges in energy and transport costs, and now tightness in consumer spending and unreliability in postal deliveries, are doing for many less vulnerable businesses, and have done for it.

Perhaps its legacy is the culture change of which it has been such an important part, but I grieve for the small suppliers who have now lost a rare outlet.