I noticed in the gospel reading today on Good Friday, that when the they came for Jesus in the Garden, it said that they asked him if he was Jesus. And when Jesus replied that it was him,
then some of them fell backwards to the ground.
I have never understood what made them fall backwards. Does anyone have an answer?
Answering it in the context of the gospel, first you would notice that the Johannine Jesus fearlessly faces His captors. Jesus, “knowing what was going to happen,” makes no attempts to run away; instead, He does the arrest party’s work for them by going in front and bolding revealing His identity. Perhaps they were not prepared for this show of fearlessness and audacity that it shocked them; “they went back and fell to the ground.”
Note that John doesn’t speak of Judas kissing Jesus or the disciples running away (John’s Jesus explicitly tells the arrest party to let them be): he consistently portrays Jesus as being the one who is in control of all the events that is happening to Him. This is one instance which highlights this theme.
Most importantly, however, you would note that Jesus had identified Himself as “I am.”
Egō eimi. This very much evokes the same phrase God says to Moses (in the Septuagint):
Egō eimi ho ōn. “I am He who is.” This a good instance of Johannine paradox: just as Jesus’ freedom is about to be violated by His enemies, the divine nature of Jesus shines through and overwhelms those seeking to destroy Him. John had actually set up a foreshadowing of this earlier in his gospel. When Jesus foretells Judas’ betrayal, He says (13:19), “I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that
I am (
egō eimi).” Guess what happens? When it does take place, He says the very same words He said back at the supper: “I am.” The captors’ reaction is also very Scriptural: falling down to the ground is the typical biblical reaction to a manifestation of the divine presence. (There may probably be an allusion here to passages like Isaiah 11:4 or Psalm 56:9.) Somewhat ironically, Moses also falls down to the ground when he sees the burning bush!
John really likes double meanings: he takes one word and applies with it multiple meanings. It’s right there in chapter 1 and its talk of “the Word,” which at once could evoke the Greek philosophical concept of the Logos
and the Jewish Wisdom tradition; in chapter 3, we have some clever wordplay involving the words
anothen (‘again’/‘from above’) and
pneuma (‘wind’/‘spirit’). The story of the Samaritan woman first starts with a request for literal
water but then moves on to a discussion about spiritual water. When Jesus speaks of Himself as the bread of life and how one must gnaw on His
flesh to gain eternal life, His hearers think of it in cannibalistic terms. When Jesus speaks of going away, the people think of how may be talking of going to another place or even committing suicide! The double meaning element may be present here: on the one hand,
egō eimi is simply the Greek for “I am,” but “I am” in the Jewish Scriptures means something more.
