Introduction to John’s Gospel.

John’s gospel is treasured by many Christians and has long been regarded in the church as giving us the clearest picture of who Jesus was. In one of the famous images from the Book of Kells, John’s gospel is represented by an eagle. This way of representing the gospels comes from the early church, who interpreted the prophecy of Ezekiel chapter 1 as referring to the different characteristics of the four gospels. The idea behind this comes from the way each gospel begins. The first 18 verses of John’s gospel, known as the prologue, views the gospel from a lofty height – looking back to creation and looking forward beyond Jesus’ resurrection to the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer. Even though the first few verses give a very lofty view, the rest of the gospel is very personal.

In an interview Trevor McDonald the journalist reflected on the immediate aftermath of an interview he had with Saddam Hussein. He said that his Iraqi minders had crowded around him after the interview anxious to find out more – but to his surprise they weren’t interested so much in what Saddam had said – they wanted to know what he was like as a person. They were mortally afraid of meeting him because of his fearsome reputation. How may powerful people in history would have been described as loving by those closest to them? Before Jesus came the typical believer would have been taught that God is holy and that the ‘fear of God’ was the beginning of wisdom. A Jew wasn’t even allowed to say the name of God on fear of death for committing blasphemy. John in his gospel not only wants to encourage us to believe, but he wants us to get to know God in a more personal way through Jesus. If God is love, how can that be revealed to us? Words can only go so far. God chose to send his Son who would show his love for us not just in dying for us but also in his time with the disciples. At his advanced age, John appreciates that the eye witnesses to Jesus’ ministry soon would not be around, and he clearly felt the responsibility of passing on his experience (John 20:30, 21:24). Rather than trumpeting his credentials as a leader in the early church, John presents himself as first and foremost a witness to the deep love of Christ for his disciples and for all humanity. By identifying himself as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ he may be hinting that he was in the inner circle of disciples (referred to in the Synoptic Gospels as Peter, James and John) – but it is also possible that he was a ‘minor’ disciple who also experienced the love of Christ. The deep and weighty themes in the prologue reverberate throughout the gospel. Many of us will have read and mostly understood the gospel as children, and yet it has depths of meaning to be discovered the more we read and think about it.

When we want to discover why John wrote his gospel we can look at John 20:29, 30 ‘This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true. Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.’ So John – commissioned by Jesus to give witness to him – is concerned with giving us clear signs and – by showing the examples of others who met Jesus – to help us answer the question for ourselves ‘who is Jesus?’ Covered by the video.

The Prologue 1:1-18

This is a carefully written poem that contains the gospel in a nutshell. There is evidence that some early Christians carried these verses with them everywhere in an amulet.

The introduction mirrors the conclusion – it’s about the Word, the revelation of God to us. Some interpreters see a pattern and structure to this section, and everyone agrees that the themes in the Prologue will be explored in detail throughout the gospel.

The Word and Creation
With the words ‘in the beginning’ any reader who knows the Bible will immediately think about the first words of the Bible in Genesis chapter 1. In this typical allusion to Old Testament scriptures John takes his readers back to the beginning suggesting that wisdom and knowledge were there from the start. At this point Jews, philosophies and many world religions might agree. But of course John goes further. Another typical feature of John’s Gospel is that there are always new layers of truth to those who look for it. This one comes like a series of three waves that tell us more and more about the Word – these second and third waves are a new and bold interpretation in the light of his faith that Jesus is the Son of God: ‘the word was God and the word was with God’. John’s proclamation of Jesus as the Son of God is one of the most striking hallmarks that sets it apart from other gospels. But how can he be God AND ‘with God? We have here a key verse for understanding the Trinity. If God is Love, then the love between the Father and the Son is how that love is expressed in Eternity. Although he doesn’t mention the Spirit explicitly in this Prologue, John has a lot to say about the Spirit particularly in the second half of the gospel. Readers will have recalled Gen 1:2 ‘the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters’ so we can take the agency of the Spirit in creation as implied. All things created through him… – the logos (Word) was never created.
Life and Light – two of the key themes in this gospel were key elements in creation. John’s readers will have been taken back to Genesis 1, where the light was separated from the darkness before the creation of the sun, moon and stars. In the Old Testament – and in John’s gospel, there is a cosmic battle going on, with darkness representing the forces of evil and light representing revelation, glory and holiness. ‘The light shines in darkness and the darkness can’t comprehend it’. For John, the cosmic battle is not a contest – the darkness can never conquer evil.
The witness to the world by John the Baptist v6-8. For John, the important fact about John the Baptist is that he was a God-ordained ‘witness to the Light’ with the aim ‘that all should believe in him’. The theme of witnesses runs through the gospel and at times it almost reads like a cosmic courtroom drama. Rather than count the hundreds or thousands of followers/believers in Jesus, John chose a small number of witnesses to make the case for who Jesus was. Although John the Baptist was clearly a prophet in his own right fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy, most of the witnesses were ordinary people trying to work out for themselves who Jesus was and what he meant to them.
The Reactions to the Word in the World (v9-13)
‘He was in the world and the world was made through him and the world didn’t know him’. In the first half of the Gospel John will show how, in spite of Jesus doing miracles and showing signs that he was the fulfilment of the prophecies about a Messiah, people still didn’t believe. For John, a witness to Jesus demands a response
Even worse was that ‘he came to his own, and his own (people) did not receive him’. John is very critical of the Jewish leaders, particularly in John chapter 8. But elsewhere there are so many indications that he treasured his Jewish heritage and the rich symbolism embedded in the rituals of the Jewish festivals.
‘As many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God even to those who believe in his name’. This looks forward to John 3:16 and his discussion about new birth with Nicodemus. So John is saying that God in his Grace is extending the offer of family membership to all, not just the Jews. Note that for John, the faith of the individual is important, but our right to be children of God is a gift. Born ‘not of blood’ – membership in God’s family no longer depended on your lineage. Even those who had been born as Jews had to come to Jesus to be born of the Spirit.
The Confession of the Word by the Church (v14-18)
‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the father, full of Grace and Truth’. This remarkable verse is the Incarnation in a nutshell. In those times of the early church, Greek philosophy taught that things of the flesh were to be despised, and some early Christians were misled into thinking that Jesus was divine but not really human. John shatters this illusion, and brings the Word back to earth with a bump! Not only did the Word visit us as a human, but he ‘tabernacled’ with us – pitched a tent and stayed with us. To any Bible reader this brings to mind the image of the tabernacle in the wilderness over which God dwelt as a ‘cloud of glory’. For John, we don’t need to look for a physical place for God to meet the world (tabernacle or temple) – God’s glory has now been embodied in Jesus. And for John, he sees his main mission as being to witness to having been a witness to the Word abiding on earth as a real breathing man who showed God’s love to his disciples. Testifying to the loving nature of that relationship was even more important than reciting all the miracles and words that Jesus had said in his time on earth. It is very likely that John already knew of Mark’s gospel and/or circulating collections of Jesus’ sayings – and he doesn’t attempt to pack it all into his gospel. Not because it isn’t important, but because he has a laser like focus on showing the face of Jesus to us as clearly as he can. ‘We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the father’. John may have been an old man when he wrote this, but he had told the story so many times his memory was clear. Note that John wanted to make sure that we see that Jesus’ glory was perfected in his humanity.

Different perspectives in different gospels

In 1851 one of the largest and most perfect diamonds ever seen (the Koh-i-noor) (which had been taken from India and given to Queen Victoria) was recut to make it in perfect condition for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was mounted in a cage on a bed of black velvet with gas lights to shine on it to bring out it’s sparkle. Viewing it from different angles brought new insights into its beauty, and each of the Jewellers assigned to the job of cutting it brought their own vision of how to best bring out its beauty. Thousands came to see it, but when the lights were switched off it was just like a lump of glass. God’s glory is not like that, but no single gospel writer could capture the full wonder of what they had seen, heard and experienced.