Category Archives: John

good news. I’m not.

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A woman runs into town.

“Come and see! Come and see!”

No one looks up. She’s fallen in and out of love so many times that no one much cares what she says. Her judgment about what is worth looking at is, shall we say, uncertain.

“I think I might have found the Christ.”

You can imagine what is running through minds along the street. “That’s what you are calling him now?” “Isn’t that a stretch, even for you?”

“He’s told me everything I ever did.”

The people stopped.

This is a woman married five times. This is a woman keeping house again. This is a woman with denial challenges. This is a woman who goes to get water when no one else will be at the well, no one to ask questions, to shy away, to point. This is a woman with a gaping hole in her self. This is a woman who says, “this time it will be different. This time I’ve changed. Forget all the rest of those times. This time, it will work.”

And this woman comes running into town demanding attention, admitting to everyone that there really has been trouble in her life. And her invitation is to come and meet the man who has seen her heart and still been willing to converse with her.

Her work as an evangelist was powerful. The people from the village stopped what they were doing and followed her to Jesus. Not because she was perfect and polished and newly successful. Because for the first time they could remember, she told the truth about herself.

Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it, about why Christians think they need to be perfect? And why that doesn’t seem to work so well?

Maybe we just need to be honest about ourselves.

Become one of us.

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Last year, Chris and Julien wrote a book called Trust Agents.  They talked about people we turn to because we trust them. They carefully and thoughtfully build reputations. They care about other people. Even though they may be part of an organization or company, they care more about people than about the structure.

One of the characteristics of a trust agent, according to Chris and Julien, is that trust agents are “One of Us.” We are more likely to trust someone if we think they understand what it’s like to be us, if they are part of our community, if they belong.

For example, I am more likely to listen to you talk about how to cope with losing a job if you actually had a job and lost it. I am more likely to believe that your company cares about me if you care about me even if there is nothing in it for you.

And if you are God and perfect and mystical and holy, I am going to be more likely to trust you–as opposed to feeling coerced or thinking you imaginary–if you become one of us.

John says that’s exactly what “The Word” did.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

The Word, one of John’s names for Jesus, put on a body and walked around with people. But not so much like possession, like there was a body around and he filled it. More like he put on flesh, like he became human.

I know. There is much for theologians in this (how much God, how much human; can you be 200% something?) And I only have 20 words left.

If God were looking for trust, becoming one of us would be a big step. Of course, it would be impossible.

Unless you’re God.

a scorecard

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Nope. It’s not what you think.

When we hear the word “scorecard” and the topic on the table is “Bible” many of us start to think about how we’re doing, about who’s keeping track.

In this case, however, I’m thinking more about the phrase, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” The roster of players, the list of characters, the directory.

In the first sentences of the book called John, we see the Word, God, the Light, and now, in the sixth verse, we have a man whose name is John.

If you don’t know the story, you might guess that this is the introduction of the title character. As you read on, you might discover that you were inaccurate.

But you only discover that if you read.

Reading the first few sentences of this book can feel confusing, For the first time-reader, nothing here is obvious. It’s like walking into the middle of a conversation without knowing the topic. Everyone is really intense, really engaged and you can’t quite figure out where you are.

Word and Light are two metaphors the writer uses to talk about Jesus. That connection will become clearer later. The John of verse six is someone we know as John the Baptist. The John of the title, that’s going to be John, one of the twelve disciples, the person acknowledged as the writer of this book.

In these first sentences, rather than starting with the Baby Jesus, John (the writer), starts with theology. He goes to the beginning of time, then jumps to the overall life purpose of Jesus, explains that John (the Baptist) is an announcer, and then will start narrative work next week.

Why explain these obvious details? Because they aren’t obvious without a scorecard. And not everyone got one when you did.

In the beginning

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[John 1:1-5]

John starts writing at the beginning.

Not the beginning of the book. At THE beginning. You know, the one that came right after there was nothing.

When he wrote, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” he knew he was writing a controversial statement. He was making a claim. But he wasn’t so much making an argument about the beginning part.

“In the beginning” is an echo of the start of the whole collection of books we know as the Bible. For John, as for the rest of the followers of Jesus, as for Jesus himself, this phrase reminded them of words they had been hearing their whole lives.

“Bereishit” if they were hearing it in Hebrew, “en arche” in Greek. “In the beginning.”

They had grown up with a confidence that there was a beginning and that when this beginning happened, God is the one who made it happen.  And now John is saying that “the Word” was also God.

That’s the controversial part.

John was saying that someone, known as “the Word”, had been with God at the very beginning. He was saying that this “Word” was involved in creating, was, in fact, the means of creating.

For people who had grown up hearing, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” John was being pretty direct. He was expanding God somehow. He was challenging religious understandings. He was setting a pretty high standard for what he would need to show.

Of course, from John’s perspective, as we will see, he was merely being factual. And he isn’t wandering too far from Genesis, where God said and things were.

How, after all, did God say anything without the Word, in the beginning?

Starting backward

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Some of us start writing to see what we think. As the words come, we begin to realize what was in our head. The words come in fits and starts and then in a rush. We grin and weep as we begin to understand our hearts.

John didn’t write that way, at least not for the works we know. He knew exactly why he was choosing the stories he chose. He sorted carefully through all the possibilities, all the memories, all the images.

And then he wrote twenty-one chapters for one reason:

…that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:31)

For John, this is not a collection of interesting stories about Jesus. John wants the reader to come to understand that Jesus was about life, about hope, about God. And he will pick stories of miracles with that in mind.

In all the times I’ve read through the book called John, I haven’t considered the flow of stories as, well, as a flow. That’s because when it comes to the Bible, we pick out bits.

I’m good at telling the stories, pieces at a time. All of us (and I hardly ever say “all” about church stuff) who have watched football or baseball or basketball or Olympics or other large events have seen “John 3:16” on cardboard, which is just one bit. When we prove perspectives, when we embrace or condemn, we pick out bits.

John already picked out bits. He took the whole of his time with Jesus – which was, it seems, three years – and chooses a few pages worth of miracles and messages. With them he tells the story that gave him a life’s work and struggle.

Let’s see what he picked.