Belonging and/or nation: Postcolonial-diasporic reading of the narrative in John 4:1-42

Abstract

Narratives of nation invoke feelings of longing for community and displacement of identity in the people. Through their narratives, nationalist writers consciously forge a community to configure such displacement out of diverse and contending cultural elements, traditions, and people. In resonance with such narration of nation, the writer(s) of the Gospel of John imagined a community of the disciples that was an alternative to the dominant Roman Empire. The Gospel, as many nationalist discourses under colonialism, is an enabling discourse for the colonized community, and thus, is a decolonizing text. In search of a community, however, the Gospel coercively forged many contending discourses into one, bearing resemblance with a colonizing discourse of the Empire. In doing so, even though the Gospel is a displacement narrative of the colonized, it manifests marginalization and lack of awareness of Other within its own construction of identity. The Gospel of John, therefore, is a de/colonizing text. The Gospel forcefully destabilizes, excludes, and marginalizes the voices of Other in its narratives. These marginal voices are represented by the claims of Ioudaioi and Samaritans that simultaneously enable and contend the Gospel's essentialist articulation of communal identity and boundary. Interpreting a discourse of margins such as the Gospel of John alerts one to the critical notion and reality of the ambivalent marginality that contains both danger and promise. Reading the Gospel of John for decolonization, in that case reading the Bible, therefore, requires a constant critique that destabilizes rigid binary pattern of thought, time, or axis of power by continually asking a question -- who are the receiving ends of this newly forged discourse of power or interpretation.