The Jews decide to stone Jesus in reaction to his statement, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58). This statement is on the order of John 1, relativizing creation to the true beginning through the Logos (John 1:1). It is the priority of Christ that gives meaning to the story of Abraham and creation, and not vice versa. Christ’s time bending relativizes Abraham, the unfolding creation story of Genesis, and the unfolding of all history. In the immediate context, Jesus accuses the leading Jews of being subject to lying language and inclined to murder (8:44), including his own impending scapegoating murder, but this is not the first or final word. If, as René Girard argues (see here) language, sign making, and significance evolve around the scapegoated victim, John would subordinate this development (the evolution of language) to Jesus as the prior Word. Prior to the human word there is the divine Word, which is the origin toward which human language, history, and creation are moving. Language may have arisen historically around the scapegoated victim, but this is not the “true” origin of language, anymore than Abraham is the origin of Jesus. In Christ the unfolding of history (inclusive of the darkest episodes) and the unfolding developments of creation (evolutionary or otherwise) are relegated to contingencies, which are neither original nor enduring. The movement of history at its beginning and end, both cosmic and personal, is through the One behind and before all things (Col. 1:13) and in whom all things are summed up (Eph. 1:10).
Note that Jesus uses the present tense, “I am,” indicating it is as the incarnate and enfleshed human that he precedes Abraham. The one who is before Abraham, is the human Jesus who stands before them. He is not claiming his pre-existent, disincarnate spirit had prior existence, nor is he teaching Plato’s immortality of the soul, relativizing the significance of death and the body in comparison to the spirit (not a stoning offence). The “I” before Abraham is inclusive of the entire story of Jesus. There is no breaking apart of Jesus story or subjecting it to a flat chronology. It is not that the Word became incarnate and then suffered on the cross, but rather the One on the cross is the identity of the Word (Logos) and the “I” before Abraham.
This is the way the early church understood the Logos, not as a preincarnate existence, but as Jesus Christ, crucified and raised. Both Cyril and Hippolytus describe the incarnation as beginning, not from the conception or birth of Jesus, but as generated backward in time, having been woven from the sufferings of the cross.[1] It is not that the pre-existent Christ and God have a secret divine story or that the Son had spent a very long time in eternity before the incarnation. As John Behr notes, the early Church did not presume to start with the pre-incarnate Word – in fact he claims, the term “pre-incarnate” is absent from patristic literature.[2] Gregory of Nyssa, for example, begins with the cross and from the cross (in reference to Ephesians 3:18) the height, depth, breadth, and length, of all things unfolds and returns.[3]
The “I am” who faces down stoning has defeated death on the cross. The Jesus prior to Abraham is the embodied, historical Jesus, inclusive of his cross and resurrection. Death is at the center of the conversation, as for the Jews, killing Jesus would put a full stop to the conversation. Jesus is disrupting their control over meaning: “Now we know that You have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets also; and You say, ‘If anyone keeps My word, he will never taste of death’” (John 8:52). Death is their first and last word, but Jesus would relativize and obliterate its significance. They would stone him and he will be crucified, but this murder, the ultimate trauma and shame in their understanding, is not determinate.
The cosmic futility and the human drama are not without suffering, but the resolution to this suffering precedes its development, in the hope toward which it develops. There is a darkness in the history of humankind, in violent, scapegoating religion, perhaps in the entry into the world of signs and religion (the religion and language of fallen humankind), but the darkness of this development through death is neither the beginning nor end. Christ is before all things and all things are through him. The development of this birth out of darkness is guided by the light in his defeat of death (Col. 1:13). As Gregory describes, the cross is divided into four parts because the One upon it binds together in Himself all forms of existence. The apprehension of all things and the reality of all things converge on the cross.[4] The reign of death, which may seem to hold sway over life and history, is rendered as empty as Jesus’ tomb. There is a retroactive effect, in the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8).
The precedence of Christ is the continual reality sustaining the universe: “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). The creation of the cosmos and humankind come through a cataclysmic explosion, the reign of darkness and the breaking in of light, the emergence of land out of the water, the springing forth of vegetation, and the emergence of woman through man and man through woman, but this beginning is preceded by the true beginning in and through the Logos: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:16). There is a futility in creation, on the order of childbirth, but this futility is overridden, healed, or suspended by what is brought forth: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:20–22).
In the same way Christ is the guiding cosmic significance, he is the significance of Abraham and Israel. Paul describes the faith of Abraham, as synonymous with that of Christ, and thus it is resurrection faith (Rom. 4:24). He reads the history of Israel as a participation in the work of Christ: “our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:1–4). The meaning of Israel arises from the significance of Christ. The mana they ate is already the spiritual food of Christ, the water that nourished them springs from the rock that is Christ, and their passage through the Red Sea is already baptism into Christ. As Jude states, it was Jesus Christ who rescued Israel from Egypt (Jude 5).
If Christ is the “I am” before Abraham, the spiritual rock of Israel, the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world, and Christians are those found in Christ, then there is a relativizing and erasing of the sin and death that would otherwise be definitive. In the same way the crucified Lamb precedes his nativity, so too every baptism, every entry into Christ, precedes birth. The new birth is the reality preceding birth, the resurrection is the reality preceding every death, the ascension is the reality preceding every journey through hell, so that our personal history with all of its failings is no more definitive of who we are, than the cross is the last word about Christ: “even when we were dead in our transgressions, [he] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:5–7).
This is not simply a way of understanding the inherent suffering in the cosmos and in human suffering, but is a means to comprehend personal trauma. The darkness and futility of the world take on a particular expression in each of our lives, and that trauma may seem to permanently scar or misshape our lives. Some have experienced extreme evil, such that it may seem to be primary, but Paul relativizes the futility and pictures it as erased in the way the pain of child birth is forgotten with delivery of the child (Rom. 8:22). For Paul, this is an accomplished fact: “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30). In light of the already accomplished glory, the suffering is not comparable (Rom. 8:18). Just as the pain of childbirth is not primary in giving birth, so Paul places all futility in this fading category, in light of the glory of perfected humanity found in Christ. “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach” (Col. 1:21–22).
Sin is erased, the trauma is removed, death is no more, and this is the defining reality behind all the fading contingencies that may have once seemed definitive. As Jordan Wood puts it, “God’s salvation of the world will, in the end, involve the unmaking and remaking of every tragedy or trauma that ever occurred, even those that from our temporal vantage appear fixed in the past.”[5] He says this in light of the theology culminating in Maximus the Confessor:
[I]t is for the sake of Christ—that is, for the whole mystery of Christ—that all the ages and the beings existing within those ages received their beginning and end in Christ. For the union of the limit of the age and limitlessness, of measure and immeasurability, of finitude and infinity, of Creator and creation, and of rest and motion, was conceived before the ages. This union has been manifested in Christ at the end of time, and through itself bestows the fulfillment of God’s foreknowledge.[6]
Predestination is not bound by sequence or by cause and effect in time, but bends around Christ, in whom all things have been predestined or foreordained in an already accomplished fact to work for the good (Rom. 8:28).
[1] Cyril of Alexandria, First Letter to Succensus, 4. Hippolytus, Antichrist 4. Cited in John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 17-18.
[2] Behr, 15.
[3] Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): The Great Catechism, 32
[4] Ibid.
[5] Jordan Wood, “The End of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Patristic Doctrine of Deification.” Thank you Jordan for sharing this insightful piece.
[6] Maximus, QThal 60.4 (CCSG 22, 75–7; Constas 429). Cited by Jordan, 13.