I had planned on writing a little something on Sukkoth this year, but the week was busy and the festival has since passed. But I still figured this might be of interest for some.
Sukkoth, known as the Feast of Tabernacles, makes an important appearance in the Gospel of John. As we are coming out of this holy time, which was commemorated on October 2, 2012 this year, I was reflecting on the importance of the event and how it ties into its most famous New Testament reference in the Gospel of John.
On the one hand, in John, chapters 7 through 9, we find a Jesus who is being pursued by the Pharisees because, as the gospel writer tells us, they want him dead. Jesus tells his disciples to go ahead of him into Jerusalem to celebrate the holy week (in Jesus’ day it was a seven day celebration), but latter makes his way there as well.
While John is no stranger to harsh depictions of the Jews, it is somewhat surprising to find those same Jews mercilessly hunting down Jesus despite the sanctity of the event, especially since during the passion they at least seem to revere the prohibition against his dead body remaining on the cross over Shabbat. The interesting correlation here is that Sukkoth commemorates the Jews’ wanderings in the wilderness when they carried with them the Ark of the Covenant while they set up a makeshift tabernacle where the ark would come to rest. With the construction of Herod’s temple, and before that Solomon’s, the Shekinah glory of God was provided a place of residence. We cannot be positive how Jews celebrated Sukkoth in the first century and most likely practices varied. At least one criterion, which depending upon whether you lived in a walled city, would determine the length of the celebration. During the years of the temple, the multi-day celebration and festivals, including a pilgrimage to Hakhel, and at least every seventh year, the faithful gathered in the Temple courtyard on the first day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot to hear readings, according to Deuteronomy 31:10-13. Other testimonies to the festival appear in Nehemiah, Leviticus, the Mishnah, Tosefta, and both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.
It is interesting that the practice that comes down from the Rabbinic tradition is most commonly associated with building sukkahs, or makeshift dwellings, in imitation of the dwellings Israel’s ancestors must have inhabited as a nomadic people during the Egyptian exilic period.
Between chapters 7 and 9 in John, Jesus is chased from the Temple and finds his way to the outside where on the day after the seven-day long commemoration, he is said to have cured a blind man. There are some interesting apologetic motifs here, if indeed this was the author’s intention. In John 4, Jesus tells the Samaritan women that the true followers of God will not worship him in the temple or on the mountain (since the Samaritans believed Mount Gerizim to be the site of God’s coming to Moses and so ignored Jerusalem), but in “spirit and truth.” Therefore, Jesus’ being ousted from the temple during the time of a holy day that commemorated being “outside the temple” seems to be a symbolic but also a thematic point in the gospel of John, which of course makes sense when one considers that John, the latest of the canonical gospels was written after the Destruction of the Temple, and so was an attempt to write a narrative that downplayed the importance of the Temple in Israel’s destiny as a people. Here then, perhaps John was eluding to the true meaning of the Feast of Tabernacles, which involved recovering a time in which those wandering in the wilderness were led by the presence of God. It is not without irony that at the culmination of this story, Jesus’ opens the eyes of a blind man, which the Pharisees who chase him out of the Temple believe he does to indict them of their own spiritual blindness. The Pharisees are indicted for working their form of Judaism from within the confines of the Temple, while John is attempting to show that the true power of God outside the temple. It is a classic Christian re-interpretation of the material.
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