cincinnatus_c | Age to age shall say

Before it gets too far away: I concluded my Lenten bible-reading this year with the gospel of John and I noticed another one of those things that hit you like a hammer that's previously somehow gone right through you unresisted: the story of Jesus healing the blind man in chapter 9 starts with a bit where the disciples ask him whether the man himself or his parents sinned so that he was born blind, which is an obviously weird question that John misdirects you from, Plato-style, by having Jesus say neither, he was born blind so that the workings of God can show themselves in him. I've noticed the weird question before but what I hadn't noticed is that immediately before that, at the end of the preceding chapter, "the Jews" are about to stone Jesus because he has said, in response to their asking how Abraham could be glad to see him doing his stuff as he has told them Abraham is, "before Abraham was born, I am". This is one of several times in the gospel of John that Jesus invokes God's "I am" from the burning bush in reference to himself. The whole end of chapter 8 has to do with the wibbly-wobbliness of God-time, eternity, the time which not only God/Jesus but all who "believe" inhabit (another repeated phrase in John: "an hour is coming, and has come"), and chapter 9 picks right up again with that. (It goes on to have Jesus say that he has come to make the blind see and the seeing blind, and it turns out that being able to see is a curse (analogous to how people from Joshua to Paul say that being under the Mosaic law is a curse) because only those who can see can sin. Well... then.)

But absolutely the most Plato moment in the whole bible is when Jesus says to his guys in chapter 16 that he has spoken to them in "figurative language" (as the NASB translates παροιμίαις, which you could literally translate as "beside-the-ways") but "an hour is coming" when he'll speak plainly--and they immediately say, oh, now we know you're speaking plainly! Oh no, oh no, oh well.