The Problem With Signs
"The Tridium Faces of Jesus” - By Erin-Lara Forsythe
The Problem With Signs
By Gabriella Wilke
In John’s gospel, they are not miracles but signs and wonders. I would guess they probably gesture to the same reality. The same social reality, that is. For those of us who have a moderate skill for pattern recognition, signs are everywhere. But we’re not always encouraged to connect them to what’s going on around us.
Perhaps William Blake can help me articulate what I mean. For the Romantic poet, the social and psychological are deeply intertwined. While The Songs of Innocence and of Experience are meant to reflect the “two contrary states of the human soul,” they also point to the social conditions that help create these contrary states. “And I am black, but O! my soul is white,” says the little black boy in a song of innocence. “They think they have done me no injury… / Who make up a heaven of our misery,” retorts the narrator in a song of experience.
The social context for these poems is child labor (“The Chimney Sweeper”) and slavery (“The Little Black Boy”). But we also see how the language and structures of our faith tradition help justify “our misery.” In the innocence poem, for instance, the “shady grove” that might offer some reprieve from “the beams of love” becomes villainized through this allusion to the Genesis story: “The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice, / Saying: Come out from the grove, my love & care / and round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.” Should love really be a heat to bear or is it more like shade from the heat? Perhaps a more careful reader might beware this golden tent.
In Cana, Jesus performs two miracles (if we must use that term). While the wedding at Cana is better remembered, today’s reading is about the second sign, a sign of experience. Here, a royal official’s child is sick, and the official asks for the boy to be healed. We might pause to remember the social context of oppression under Roman rule. The official may have benefited from this arrangement, but other members of his household—namely his slaves—suffer in this society. And now a child is “near death” too.
There’s not enough information to say for certain what this man’s faith tradition is, but we do know the Greco-Roman religion was also part of civic life. Political leaders like the emperor were often seen as divine, and other aspects of this religion would’ve been part of the experience of domination. Cultic acts, such as sacrifices and prayers to the gods, were more important than holding the right beliefs. And receiving divine help in the here and now was more important than whatever is in the afterlife. It is in this context that Jesus and other Jewish miracle-working sons of God begin their ministries.
So Jesus does heal the child, and the slaves do help confirm it. But I think this is also a rare moment where Jesus shows us his hand. Of how it works, this society of domination. Try it out to see if you can get there. Say it with disgust, say it with grief, say it with spite, and now try it again with the cold knowledge of what often happens to children, slaves, and other humans the system does not consider people: “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”
The problem, of course, is that empire can co-opt anything to serve its own purpose. It can take a rebuke to Roman authority and turn it into piety. Or claim you’ll be rewarded in heaven for the poor working conditions it causes now. It can even use its own signs and wonders to make you believe its ideology. And these things do a kind of violence to us, shaping how we interpret the next visible sign of state-sponsored cruelty. We might ask ourselves this Lent: do we condone this violence—“for the sake of his passion”—or do we condemn it?
Gabriella Wilke is the marketing and audience development director at Commonweal. She lives in central Minnesota with her husband and cat.
Erin-Lara Forsythe is a sacred art painter. She works in oil, acrylic, and mixed media depicting the mystical traditions of the Catholic faith. See more: erinlara.com