FOR THOSE WITH EYES TO SEE, the symbolism in the Gospel of John invites us into remarkable, even transformative encounters.
The gospel’s prologue, for example, proclaims a light in the darkness, a light the darkness doesn’t overcome. Many see this to be an image of the sun and the invincible solar hero, but I feel it’s even more an image of the dying and returning moon. It is the lunar cycle, after all, that gives us a natural experience of the core Christian motif of rising on the third day.
What’s remarkable about this image of a light shining in the darkness is that it’s moonlight, not sunlight. Thus, the poetic opening of the gospel alludes to Christ with a striking image of the moon, which as Joseph Campbell (in The Masks of God, vol. 1: Primitive Mythology) and Esther Harding (in Women’s Mysteries) both tell us, is above all a symbol of the feminine.
Is this feminine symbolism for Christ just a fluke, a one-off flight of poetic fancy on the part of the evangelist (the author of the gospel), or is it the first of many such symbols hiding in a gospel known traditionally for its portrayal of Jesus as the divine Son of God the Father?
It is not a fluke.
The Gospel of John is loaded with feminine images in its Christological symbolism. Consider, for example, the dynamics between Jesus and his mother in the story of the wedding at Cana (Jn 2:13-25). While Jesus seems to dismiss his mother’s urgings to solve the wine problem, rather brusquely, he then proves himself to be his mother’s son by performing the sign and turning water into wine. The resonances are unmistakable here between this image of Jesus and Dionysus, the divine mother’s son of ancient Greece and the mythical master of the vine.
At the end of the gospel, we find another example. In John’s first resurrection story, Mary Magdalene meets a “gardener” outside the empty tomb (Jn 20:1, 11-18). Although the narrator tells us the gardener is the risen Jesus, we should not ignore the fact that Mary sees an unfamiliar man she takes to be a gardener for the cemetery. As a symbolic image, a gardener is one who cultivates and nurtures nature, who since the dawn of literature has been seen as a companion or consort of the Great Mother.
In between these two feminine images bookending John’s narrative, we find a host of other feminine images closely associated with Jesus. For example: Jesus tells Nicodemus he must be “born again” (Jn 3); Jesus presents himself as “living water” to the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4); Jesus says to the crowd following him, “I am the bread of life” (Jn 6); Jesus “bursts into tears” in loving sympathy with Mary of Bethany mourning her dead brother, Lazarus (Jn 11); Jesus is the Dionysian “true vine” (Jn 15). And there are many other examples.
What, then, are we to make of a vision of Jesus, of a Christology, that includes so much feminine symbolism? How might this soulful feminine symbolism serve to complement and balance the high spirituality and solar masculinity of the gospel’s divine Son of God imagery? Where do we encounter soul figures akin to these in our own lives? Go, live those questions for a while.
To learn more about the feminine symbolism in the Gospel of John, CLICK HERE.
Soul Spirit Wisdom 