On the Weirdness and Wonder of John

On the Weirdness and Wonder of John

May 10, 2020

John 17:1-11

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Let’s face it. The Gospel of John is weird. By whatever standard you gauge it, it’s weird. Compared to the other three canonical Gospels it seems to be from outer space. I guess there are non-canonical gospels that are weirder, but of the ones that made the cut John is by far the weirdest. I mean, just read it. In John Jesus rambles on and on, and mostly he rambles on about himself. I am this, I am that he says. I came from heaven and I’m going back to heaven he says. He answers people with non sequiturs all the time. And what is John’s Jesus all about? In Matthew, Mark, and Luke he’s mostly about proclaiming the kingdom of God. In John he’s mostly about proclaiming himself. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke he wants people to start living the kingdom life. In John all he wants is for his closest disciples to believe that he is who he says he is and came from where he says he came from, namely heaven. As many have noted, if the historical person Jesus of Nazareth had talked the way John’s Jesus talks everyone would have thought him mad (or possessed) and would have paid no attention to him. We’d never have heard of him.

The weirdest thing about John’s Jesus for me, or at least one of the weirdest, is what he says he came to earth to do. We see what he says that is in the verses I listed at the start of this piece, John 17:1-11. First of all he says that he came to give everyone something called eternal life, which he defines at John 17:3. That’s really important stuff that I’ve written on before and probably will write on again. Then at John 17:4 he says he has finished the work the Father (his most common name for God) had given him to do. A few verses later he says what that work was. He has finished the work because his disciples now “know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me.” John 17:8. That’s it. That’s what in John God sent Jesus to do, to convince a handful of people that this rube from the backwater town of Nazareth came from God.

I have to ask: What kind of sense does that make? Why would God do the really weird thing of becoming incarnate in a human being only for the purpose of convincing a small group of people that that human being was God or at least had come from God? It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but that’s what the Gospel of John says God did. Consider this. What are Jesus’ last words as he dies on the cross in John? “It is finished.” John 19:30. What’s finished? We might say his earthly life was finished because he dies immediately after he says “It is finished.” At John 19:28, however, before Jesus dies, we’re told that now “Jesus knew that all was now finished.” He has accomplished what he came to earth to do. So after he says “It is finished” he will “give up his spirit.” John 19:30. That’s his way of going home to heaven. No one kills him. He just takes charge and transitions to his original plane of being. And none of it makes any sense. God went to all the trouble of becoming incarnate just to get a few guys to believe that God had done that? Really?

Well, really, no. In the other three canonical Gospels God does nothing of the sort. In Matthew and Luke Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit, but God doesn’t conceive Jesus just so Jesus could get some fishermen and a few others to believe that God had  done that. God’s project in Jesus is much bigger and more complex than that. It has to do mostly with revealing to the world how God wants the world to be, a nonviolent world of distributive justice for all people. Only in John does God become Jesus just to get some people to accept some utterly improbably propositions about Jesus’ origin and final destination.

It makes no sense, but there it is. So if we’re going to take it seriously at all we have to figure out why the author of John wrote his Gospel that way. There is nothing in Jesus’ world to explain it, but there may well have been something in the world in which the Gospel of John was written that explains it quite well. Let me explain.

Scholars are convinced that the Gospel of John was written near the end of the first century CE, some seventy years or so after Jesus’ death. It was written for a community of early Christians that was experiencing hard times. The leaders of the Jewish synagogues they attended were throwing them out for insisting that Jesus was the Messiah, something few Jews ever came to accept. These Christians may well have experienced at least some persecution by the Roman authorities. Staying Christian was becoming a difficult thing to do. It seems likely that the author of John was looking for a way to tell Jesus’ story that would encourage people to hold tight to their Christian faith. So he told Jesus’ story with emphasis on two key theological points. First, hold on to your Christian faith because the one you have faith in was no mere human. Certainly the experience people had of Jesus both during his lifetime and thereafter made it easy enough to believe that he was God Incarnate. So the Gospel of John was written as the ultimate faith confession in Jesus as precisely that. Then hold on to your Christian faith in Jesus as the Son of God Incarnate because that was precisely what he called his disciples to do. He calls you to do it too.

The Gospel of John makes no sense in the context of Jesus’ life on earth, but it makes perfect sense in the context in which it was written. The Christian community for which it was written needed a strong, clear call to belief in Jesus, so that’s what the Gospel of John gave them. Believe in Jesus. That’s what Jesus wanted his first followers to do. It’s what God wants of you late first century Christians whose faith is threatened by hard times. So on its face big parts of the way John tells Jesus’ story makes no sense. Yet like so many parts of the Bible it makes a lot more sense when we understand the historical context in and for which it was written.

So what does all that mean for us? One thing I think it means is don’t let John’s evident weirdness put you off. Whatever the circumstances of its creation John, for all its weirdness, speaks profound spiritual truths. Jesus Christ truly is for us God Incarnate, and John is the Gospel of Incarnation par excellence. Scholars say Jesus never spoke the words John attributes to him, but so what? It doesn’t change the truth of what John has him say. For us Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He is our living water and our good shepherd. In him we do find eternal life. He meant by that life in the knowledge of the one true God and of Jesus Christ whom God sent. John 17:3. Yet we know that the meaning of an author’s words are not limited to the author’s original intent. So John’s phrase eternal life can indeed mean a blissful eternity in heaven like most people take it to mean.

Especially in times like these we all need ground in which hope can grow. The Gospel of John can be that ground. Don’t let its weirdness put you off, and I say that to myself as much as I say it to you. Yes, John is weird. John is also wonderful. May we learn to live in its wonder. Amen.