Ever since I participated in a writing workshop a couple of summers ago, I have been thinking about gaps. In the workshop we talked briefly about using aporias—gaps or spaces in a story—to highlight certain parts of a narrative or to create tension that the reader can resolve on their own. Storytelling is the art of conveying information, but it’s also the art of knowing what to leave out—the skill of saying less than you might know. I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to notice the aporias in things—in fiction, nonfiction, music, poetry—and trying to figure out how to use it to good effect in my own writing.
The gospel reading from the lectionary for January 14th is full of aporias—it’s full of gaps in the story that make it challenging to interpret. The reading is John 1:43-51, the passage where Jesus is calling some of his disciples, and where we are privy to some of the disciples’ thoughts on Jesus and his hometown. All of John’s first chapter is choppy, come to think of it; it’s full of seams and gaps between sections, full of aporias. By the time we arrive in these verses as readers, we have already covered a lot of ground, not all of it naturally related: the cosmic prologue, an introduction to John the Baptist, Jesus’ baptism (which in John is only a partial baptism story, with an aporia at the moment we might have expected to see Jesus being actually baptized), and finally the end of the chapter where we have arrived at this scene of the call of the disciples. Many scholars believe that this first chapter of John is cobbled together from at least two sources; the poetic prologue (“In the beginning was the word…”), and the beginning of the so-called “signs source” that makes up most of the first half of the gospel. The first chapter of John is pulling a lot of different things together, so it might not be surprising that it feels a little choppy, and full of open spaces between these narratives where we might have hoped for connective tissue.
When we get to this reading at the end of the chapter, in verses 43-51, things move quickly, leaving a lot of open space in the story. The Gospel of John tends to slow down and zoom in when Jesus speaks, giving Jesus the microphone for long stretches. But here, Jesus’ words are truncated and even cryptic; Jesus is kind of sphinxlike in his terse responses.
For instance, look at 1:43. We get three pieces of information, right in a row:
· The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee,
· Jesus found Philip,
· Jesus said words to Philip: “Follow me.”
That’s it. There’s no back-and-forth with Philip, no scene of introduction, no monologue in which Jesus explains himself, no narrator’s note about what it might mean for Philip to follow Jesus. All we get is those three sparse bits of information, and lots of gaps.
I think the author of John is a fairly good storyteller, so I am inclined to assume that the author is telling the story this way on purpose. Of course, that might not be true—the story might be brief here because the author doesn’t know much about it, or because they didn’t think it was that important, or because there were other things that they wanted to get to. But if we assume that the brevity of this exchange was intentional, what does it leave out, and why? For each of the bullet points above, there are corresponding questions about what was left out. Take the first bullet point, for example. Why did Jesus decide to go to Galilee? Did he go there looking for disciples, or did he have some other purpose? He had already found a few disciples, a few verses earlier, Andrew and Peter. Why did he want disciples in the first place? Was Galilee an especially auspicious place to look for a disciple? Did he have someone in mind already? Those kinds of questions, and the kinds of gaps they point to, are the kinds of places sermons come from—the aporias into which we can fit our theologies and interpretations.
The second bullet point has just as many questions. Why Philip? Was Jesus looking for him all along, or did he just happen upon him? Was Philip the reason Jesus went to Galilee in the first place? Did they know each other beforehand? What did Philip do to draw Jesus’ attention? And the third bullet point, Jesus’ words to “Follow me,” might be the most cryptic of all. What did Jesus mean by it? What did Philip hear in those words? (If someone came up to me on the street and said “Follow me,” I might be very suspicious of their motivations, or I might try to read their tone to discern their purpose. I might wonder if they wanted me to help with some emergency, or if they were trying to draw me into some conspiracy. I probably would not intuit that “follow” meant not to physically trail behind them, but to devote my life to their teachings). Why are we told nothing else about their conversation—what Philip said in response to Jesus, or what kind of back-and-forth might have taken place?
The rest of this passage unfolds the same way. Philip, we are told, is from the same town as Andrew and Peter, but that bit of information is quickly abandoned by the narrator in favor of a story about Nathanael. Philip, now apparently evangelical about this Jesus guy (though the narrator has not told us how or why), finds Nathanael and announces Jesus as the one “about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” There are some huge gaps here. How does Philip know all of this? Did Jesus tell him, as part of a conversation we don’t know about? Did Philip just guess it? Was it revealed to him somehow? Were Andrew and Peter somehow involved, even though the text doesn’t even place them in town with Jesus? Was Jesus already famous enough for that kind of information to just follow him around? Did someone on the street tell Philip who Jesus’ father was? Did Philip and Nathanael have an ongoing, pre-existing conversation about messianic expectation, so that Nathanael would have been waiting for Philip to show up and announce that “we found him”? We just don’t know. To add to the mystery, Nathanael doesn’t appear in any other gospels in lists of Jesus’ disciples; only John includes him. (Tradition suggests that Nathanael might be the same person the synoptic gospels call Bartholomew, but that’s based on speculation and the fact that Philip is paired with Nathanael in John and with Bartholomew in the synoptics).
We do know, however, that Nathanael is skeptical and suspicious. Maybe he too feels like Philip skipped straight to the answer and didn’t show his work. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” For Nathanael, the answer seems to be no. Again, the reasons for Nathanael’s bias against Nazareth isn’t spelled out, although historical critical research is forever trying to show that such a bias would have been normal in that time and place.
More aporias ensue. Jesus sizes Nathanael up as he is walking toward him, and declares that he is an undeceitful Israelite. How Jesus knew that, the narrator does not tell us, and apparently Nathanael didn’t know either, because he asked Jesus how he could conclude such a thing. Jesus’ answer, again, skips right to the answer without showing any work: “I saw you under the fig tree.” Well that settles that. Nathanael’s reply seems completely disjointed from the things that came before. Skeptical to this point, Nathanael is convinced by Jesus’ having seen him earlier, and he makes a couple of very grandiose declarations about Jesus: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”
How did Nathanael get to that point? The titles he bestows on Jesus are even grander than the things Philip had told him about Jesus; remember, Philip had just said that Jesus was the one that Moses and the prophets had written about. Nathanael was getting very specific: Son of God and King of Israel. As readers, we aren’t let in on how Nathanael got to that conclusion, but we are treated to Jesus’ response, which was to promise more and better to come.
I sometimes ask my students to imagine that they are directing a play, with the biblical text as the script. How would you ask the actors to say their lines? What kind of scenery or props would be necessary to make the text make sense? How much work does the inflection of the voice have to do to create coherence and continuity? In this passage, my sense is that the actors would have to do a lot of work between the lines to tie all of this together. They would need to convey a great deal with their body language and intonation and the choices of which words to emphasize, because what’s on the page doesn’t do all the work of explaining things. The written word doesn’t clue the reader in to any of the nuance, motivation, or subtext of anyone’s role in this passage. A lot could be solved by placing the actors portraying Andrew and Peter in the background, nodding encouragingly, implying that they were vouching for Jesus to their old friends Philip and Nathanael, but that is really departing from the text, which doesn’t suggest any such thing.
Perhaps, by the time this gospel was being composed in the late first century, the readers that the author was imagining would have known enough to fill in some of the blanks. Maybe this was a famous story in the community, so the author didn’t feel the need to spell it all out. Maybe there was some aspect of Christology or theology that they would have known that we don’t know, that made it all come together. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we aren’t the ones this text was written for. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that it doesn’t answer all of our questions, because it wasn’t written with us in mind.
And anyway, as I am learning as I renew my study of writing, it’s often the gaps that say the most. There’s a saying in automotive racing: add lightness. Sometimes what’s missing from a winning race car is negative weight; sometimes the best modification is to remove something that’s unnecessarily dragging things down, like an air conditioner or a spare tire or some of the seats. In writing, or in storytelling, sometimes the urge to say everything, to exhaustively record or explain, can overwhelm the reader and stifle their imagination. (I write these words as I approach 1,700 words for this post). Whatever the reasons for the Gospel of John to leave so many gaps in this story, the result is that we have a lot of places to put our questions, and our readerly creativity, and our theological imagination.
Awesome!