Highlights from John's Gospel

The Gospel According to John is a rich narrative built around many stories, metaphors, themes, concepts, events, prayers, teachings, and allusions to the Old Testament. After reading and listening to it multiple times over the past month, it is hard to pick out what is most striking, meaningful, challenging, comforting, or confusing. My previous post provided some brilliant and helpful summaries made by others. To those, I add Eugene Peterson's brilliant discussion in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pages 85-108).

Here are a few interrelated themes that stood out to me personally. They are so connected that it is hard to put them in a particular order.

Incarnation

The living Word of God became a living human in the form of Jesus. He was the embodiment of God's love, promises, character, power, mystery, grace, and truth.

Sin and salvation

Make no mistake. Humans are sinful. Sin is slavery, destructive, evil, dark, opposed to truth, and leads to spiritual death and judgement, both now and for eternity. Humans need to be saved and redeemed from these terrible consequences. Jesus offers salvation through his sacrificial death. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The whole second half of the Gospel centres around Jesus' death.

Belief, love, and obedience

These cannot be separated. Belief is not just intellectual assent to propositional truth. Belief/faith is trust and active participation. Belief, obedience, love, and personal revelation are synergistic and not sequential. "He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me... I will love him and manifest myself to him." (14:21, RSV). (This verse was very helpful to me early in my Christian journey when I memorised it more than forty years ago). See also 7:18 and 8:31-2.

A new creation

John 1 echoes the creation account in Genesis 1, "In the beginning God created..." all life, something good, with powerful words. This creation continues in Jesus, the living Word, who entered this creation to make a new creation, an abundant life and salvation.

Abundant life

Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." (10:10, NIV). John wrote his Gospel "that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (20:31, NIV).

Jesus does not just offer eternal life but an abundant life now, even though that may involve suffering, sacrifice, sickness, and death. It is now but not yet. Time and eternity come together in the incarnation, his death, his resurrection, and even in our own lives.

The Spirit

Jesus promised his followers to not leave them alone but to send the Spirit: his living presence, a comforter and advocate. The Spirit convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgement. The Spirit guides us into the truth, reminding us of Jesus' teaching. The Spirit enables us to forgive others and can unite Christians. The Spirit empowers us for mission, enabling acts of service and bearing witness to the truth. (As the Father sent Jesus, so he sends us).

The characteristics above show that the Spirit is practical, concrete, and personal. This is far from some abstract, vague, and impersonal force. The spirit is not something special people tune into through some mystical process to provide some secret knowledge or an inner voice that will prompt them to take some action to enhance their affluent lifestyle.

False dichotomies and dialectic

The world [cosmos] is flawed, broken, evil, and opposed to Jesus and his followers. Yet this world is also created, beautiful, and redeemable. Jesus did not come to condemn the world but to save it.

Jesus' Kingdom is for this world, but its' values are not derived from this world. It is an upside-down kingdom.

The abstract and concrete, the spiritual and material, time and eternity, faith and works. Each half of these pairs is often brought into tension or said to contradict the other half of the pair. However, in the Gospel of John, and ultimately in Jesus, they are brought together in beautiful life-enhancing ways.

Reading the Gospel of John

This month in the theology reading group, we are doing something different. We are not reading a theology book, but a book of the Bible! We will be discussing the Gospel of John. In preparation, I am listening to large sections.

Below is some material that I have found helpful concerning the big picture.

Here is an introduction written by Eugene Peterson for The Message.

"In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God is presented as speaking the creation into existence. God speaks the word and it happens: heaven and earth, ocean and stream, trees and grass, birds and fish, animals and humans. Everything, seen and unseen, called into being by God’s spoken word.

In deliberate parallel to the opening words of Genesis, John presents God as speaking salvation into existence. This time God’s word takes on human form and enters history in the person of Jesus. Jesus speaks the word and it happens: forgiveness and judgment, healing and illumination, mercy and grace, joy and love, freedom and resurrection. Everything broken and fallen, sinful and diseased, called into salvation by God’s spoken word.

For, somewhere along the line things went wrong (Genesis tells that story, too) and are in desperate need of fixing. The fixing is all accomplished by speaking—God speaking salvation into being in the person of Jesus. Jesus, in this account, not only speaks the word of God; he is the Word of God.

Keeping company with these words, we begin to realize that our words are more important than we ever supposed. Saying “I believe,” for instance, marks the difference between life and death. Our words accrue dignity and gravity in conversations with Jesus. For Jesus doesn’t impose salvation as a solution; he narrates salvation into being through leisurely conversation, intimate personal relationships, compassionate responses, passionate prayer, and—putting it all together—a sacrificial death. We don’t casually walk away from words like that."

Here is a word cloud for the book. 

Here are the poster and videos from The Bible Project

Part 1

Part 2