It was Monday morning. The English muffin was toasting. I started laughing. I laughed hard enough that I  almost started crying from the relief. I buttered the English muffin.

Here’s what made me start: John doesn’t have any parables.

Let me go back.

I’ve had a challenging time writing about the book of John. I have regularly struggled with how to explain. For the past week, I’ve been trying to figure out how to capture, briefly, the last part of chapter 12. It’s a summary of the first half of the book. What John writes triggers huge theological conversations in my mind, difficult to capture in 300 words.

Then, on Monday morning, in the shower, I figured out that those paragraphs are a practical outworking of a parable Jesus told. The parable is easy to understand. And, for me anyway, it makes these paragraphs in John easier to understand.

I took my Bible to the kitchen and started flipping pages while waiting for my English muffin, looking for the specific parable, to see where John put it in the flow. And I realized that there are no parables in John.

Some of you are laughing at me right now. You know the Bible very well. You’ve read the Gospels many times, you know which one is addressed to what audience and when it was written and what the purpose is.

I suppose that I knew this once upon a time, but apparently I forgot.

This comes as a huge relief to me. My struggle isn’t about my ability to understand theology. Instead, it points to one reason there are four Gospels. There are four stories of Jesus, four accounts that have made people say, “isn’t that redundant? Why don’t they agree?”

What if there are four accounts because some people are different?