John for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-10 (The New Testament for Everyone)

by Tom Wright

The organization, ironically, is named after the people whom the first-century Jews regarded as the worst kind of outcasts.

But because the one God created both heaven and earth, and because the point of Jesus’ work is precisely to bring the life of heaven to earth, the misunderstandings are, in that sense, ‘natural’.

Alarmed, she thought he’d joined some kind of cult. ‘They’ve brainwashed you!’ she said. He was ready with the right answer. ‘If you’d seen what was in my brain,’ he replied, ‘you’d realize it needed washing!’

What the gospel does is to administer a sharp jolt, to shine a bright light, to kick-start the brain, and the moral sensibility, into working properly for the first time.

Her reaction to this is a classic example of what every pastor and evangelist knows only too well. Put your finger on the sore spot, and people will at once start talking about something else. And the best subject for distracting attention from morality is, of course, religion.

and maybe (the hidden punchline of the argument) the morality we were taught is equally uncertain.

Holy buildings, and holy mountains, are at best signposts to the real thing. If they become substitutes for it, you’re in trouble. That way lies idolatry, the worship of something that isn’t God as if it were.

He is spirit: not the kind of spirit that abhors the physical world (he made it, after all), but the kind that, as we say, transcends it, rather as the author and producer of a play ‘transcend’ the action on stage – even though, in this case, it seems as though the author has himself come to play the leading role.

Somehow, wherever in the world this music is played, the message has gone home that people in need can be helped, indeed saved, by the story of Jesus.

From the woman’s

point of view, the conversation has thrown her into happy confusion: she seems to regard Jesus as a cross between a fortune-teller and a Messiah, but at least it’s given her the energy to go and tell other people about him.

When were you last so excited about something that you didn’t need to eat? For that matter, when were you last looking, with the eyes of Jesus, at the harvest waiting to be gathered? Might those two questions perhaps have anything to do with each other?

There was no way backwards or forwards for her; all she could do was to eke out a daily existence and make sure she went to the well at the time of day when there would be nobody there to sneer or mock. Now she has become the first evangelist to the Samaritan people. Before any of Jesus’ own followers could do it, she has told them that he is the Messiah.

But it wasn’t just a Jewish healing place. The evidence suggests that pagans, too, regarded it as a sacred site. At one stage it was dedicated to the healing god Asclepius.

Clearly, the man Jesus found lying there had made a way of life out of his long wait for healing.

When Jesus says ‘Get up!’ the word is one regularly used in the New Testament to describe the resurrection.

The word ‘sign’ doesn’t occur in this passage. By now John expects us to be counting for ourselves.

Basically, the Judaeans think it’s still time for rest, but Jesus is wide awake, and has already started the business of the day.

After all, in the present case he didn’t have to heal the man that day. He’d waited nearly forty years to be healed; another day wouldn’t have hurt him. But Jesus seems deliberately to have chosen to do it that day.

The heart of it seems to be Jesus’ belief that Israel’s God was then and there in the process of launching the new creation. And somehow this new creation was superseding the old one. Its timescale was taking precedence. God was healing the sorry, sick old world, and though there might come a time for rest (when Jesus’ own work was finished, maybe: see 19.28–30),

It seems that some sicknesses may be related to some sins, but you can’t and shouldn’t deduce the one from the other. (I had a letter two days ago from someone who saw all too clearly how sin has caused her serious illness; but I know many sick people for whom that would be an absurd conclusion, and indeed many cheerful and healthy sinners.)

We see here, in fact, the expansion and outworking of the short, sad statement in the gospel Prologue (1.10–11): ‘He came to his own, and his own didn’t accept him.’

They were living in the old time zone, and were angry with Jesus for, as it were, waking them up too soon.

Where are the followers of Jesus today who are prepared to say ‘Jesus is at work, and so am I?’

You either come to the text with a view of what is and isn’t possible in the world, which

won’t allow any fresh evidence – which is not, perhaps, the best way of approaching a book like John, which is all about the challenge of the gospel to all existing world-views – or you come with at least an open mind to new possibilities hitherto unimagined.

Nor are the extraordinary stories in the gospels designed, as some seem to have imagined, to portray Jesus as being able to do anything at all, simply for the sake of making a supernatural display. They are there, rather, as moments in the text when the strange glory of the Word-made-flesh shines through, not so much because Jesus can do whatever he wants but because this partic...

As so often, John leaves us with their puzzled question, to which Jesus will now give what seems an even more puzzling answer.

sometimes we are aware of a presence with us, which may initially be more disturbing than comforting. (‘We’re already nearly drowning, and now we’ve got ghosts following us!’)

He finished his Ph.D. But at no time, in all the art galleries, had he ever stood back and looked at the paintings themselves, and allowed them to speak in their own language.

What matters is not just what Jesus can do for you; what matters is who Jesus is. Only if you’re prepared to be confronted by that in a new way can you begin to understand what he can really do for you, what he really wants to do for you.

Second, the demand that God is making on them – the crowd realize that Jesus is pointing out that they can’t just expect bread on demand, that if this really is a heaven-sent renewal movement there will be a new standard to which they must sign up. This means that God is making a demand on them, and it is this: that they believe in Jesus. No new exposition of the detailed commandments of the law; rather, a command which, if it is to be obeyed, will require a change of heart.

He hadn’t ‘made a decision’, he said. God had closed in on him and he couldn’t escape (though at the time he had badly wanted to). The closest he would get to using the language the reporter was interested in was to say, ‘I was decided upon.’ In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he describes it in a more evocative phrase: ‘His compulsion is our liberation.’

One of the hard lessons the children of Israel had to learn in the wilderness was that their God, YHWH,

was not at their beck and call. He wasn’t o...

don’t suppose that, because you are part of God’s chosen people, that must mean you are special in and of yourselves.

Jesus seems to have the whole passage in mind.

and to

the last day. 55My flesh is true food, you see, and my blood is true drink. 56Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I remain in them. 57Just as the living father sent me, and I live because of the father, so the one who eats me will live because of me. 58This is the bread which came down from heaven; it isn’t like the bread which the ancestors ate, and died. The one who eats this bread will live for ever.’ 59He said this in the synagogue, while he was teaching in Capernaum. One of the most moving, and often forgotten, stories about King David concerns the time when he was fighting the Philistines, who had occupied his native town of Bethlehem. Among David’s fiercely loyal fighting men he had three in particular who were renowned for their bravery

and their readiness to do whatever the king might ask. When he and his men were pinned down one day, David longed for a drink, and said out loud how much he would like to have water from the well at Bethlehem – which was of course inaccessible due to the Philistines. But that didn’t stop his three heroes. Off they went, broke through the Philistine army, got water from the well at Bethlehem and brought it back to David. But David didn’t drink it. His shrewd sense of political judgment was even sharper than his thirst. ‘God forbid’, he said, ‘that I should drink the blood of these men, who went at the risk of their lives’ (2 Samuel 23.17; 1 Chronicles 11.19). He didn’t want to be seen to profit from their readiness to put their lives on the line for him. He poured the water out on the ground. Fancy a Jew talking about drinking blood! One of the best-known of the many Jewish regulations about food and drink was that blood was absolutely forbidden (Leviticus 17.10–14 is the central statement of the principle). Indeed, the complex system of kosher butchering has this among its chief aims, that no blood should remain in the animal and so risk being eaten or

drunk. And this, of course, was why David used the phrase. To drink this water would be the equivalent of drinking blood. He wouldn’t – he shouldn’t – he couldn’t do it. But the fact that Jesus speaks of ‘drinking his blood’ in this setting gives us an all-important clue to what he means in this extraordinary passage. If you want to profit from what I’m doing, he says, you must ‘eat my flesh’ and ‘drink my blood’. If you do this, you’ll live for ever; I will raise you up on the last day. In the light of the David story, we can confidently say that the deep meaning of the passage is not that those who believe in him should become cannibals, still less that they should, in ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’ him, break the Jewish law against consuming blood. What he means is what David meant. He refused to ‘drink the blood’ of his comrades – that is, to profit from the risk of their lives. Jesus, as the true Messiah, is going one better again. He will put his own life at risk – indeed, he will a...

so that it only meant an inner, non-physical event, of meditation, celebration and grateful contemplation. All of these are important, but John insists here, as does Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, that the ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’ in question must include actual physical eating and drinking. Indeed, in verses 54–58 the word for ‘eat’ is a very solidly physical one. It was often used by Greek speakers to mean something like ‘munch’ or ‘chew’, and might be used of the way that animals ate, making a noise as they did so. It may well be that some in the early church, remembering Jesus’ words most likely in the original Aramaic language that he spoke, were tempted (quite understandably) to spiritualize their meaning, and to lose any sense that he really meant to refer to an actual feeding; and John, in writing in Greek, deliberately chooses a word which rules this out. Easily the best explanation for this – though one which has proved c...

John does not describe the actual meal at the Last Supper, just as he doesn’t describe the actual baptism of Jesus. But this, we may suppose, is not because he thinks it doesn’t matter, or that he wants to play it down, but because he thinks it matters so much that it’s important to see it as affecting the whole gospel story. So here, after the feeding in the wilderness, where (as in the other gospels) Jesus’ action with the bread is described in words very like those used at the Supper itself (verse 11), we find a long discourse in which, here at its climax, Jesus declares that in order for him to be truly united with his believing followers, it is necessary for them to ‘munch’ his flesh and drink his blood. Those who do this will be people of the true Exodus. In the original Exodus, the ancestors of the present Israelites had eaten the bread they were given, but they still died. This bread, this bread-of-life which is Jesus himself, is given, and giv...

we might call ‘sacramental’ thinking is absolutely central to John’s gospel. If the Word has become flesh (1.14), we shouldn’t be surprised if the same principle is designed by God to work its way through the whole creation. There is a very careful balance to be kept, as the next passage will make clear. We can’t imagine that the whole creation is now ‘sacramental’ in this sense, as though there were nothing now wrong with any of it, and as though any experience of the created order were somehow pregnant with the presence of Jesus. That way leads straight to pantheism, nature mysticism and idolatry. Nor can we suppose that anyone who takes the Christian sacrament carelessly and without real faith is somehow to be‘magically’ saved for ever. God isn’t fooled. Eating and drinking is no good without faith, without the spirit (see verses 63–64). But it remains true that ‘God so loved the world’ (...

(see Romans 8.18–25). John, like some other early Christian writers, was prepared to see the bread and wine of the eucharist as foretastes of that great moment. Certainly almost all his first readers will have read verses 53–58 in this way. At this point to understand the text more fully requires that we do something: the thing ...

‘You’ll find out how when you really want to.’

His heart just wasn’t in it.

The trouble is, of course, that the Judaeans, perhaps not surprisingly, are coming at it the other way round. First they want to weigh up Jesus’ teaching, and

then they’ll decide whether he’s been sent by God or not. That would be all very well if they were, so to speak, neutral observers; but there is no neutrality when you’re faced with prophecy, or national crises, or huge challenges to an entire way of life. In their weighing up of Jesus, many of them have settled it in their minds that there are certain things which they do not want God to be saying to them; and if Jesus says those things, then they will rule him out of consideration right away.

That charge is worse than it might sound. As far back as Deuteronomy 13 there were biblical warnings that false prophets and teachers would arise within Israel, performing signs and wonders in order to lead Israel astray to worship foreign gods, to turn aside from the path marked out by YHWH. The penalty for such behaviour was clear: someone deceiving the people in this way was to be put to death. And several of the Judaeans thought that when Jesus told