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

by Tom Wright

the cripple to carry his mattress on the sabbath, as recorded in chapter 5, that was the telltale sign that he was in fact leading Israel away from the law, and hence from God.

Verse 17 then expands this with a challenge: maybe the reason you can’t see it comes from God is that you’ve already closed your mind against what God really wants from you. Maybe, like the young person who’s not motivated to learn a new skill, you need to come to the position where you really want God’s will, whatever it may mean for you, whatever it will

cost. If you get to that position, then what Jesus is saying will be like a cool, fresh drink on a hot and sultry afternoon. You will know, deep within yourself, that he and his teaching are from God.

Jesus was not only working to a different timetable (verse 8), but to a different programme. He was not trying to boost his own reputation, but God’s. Otherwise, why would he do things that would get him into trouble, and provoke threats on his life?

Verse 17 is important here, too: people often accuse Christians of advancing their own ideas rather than God’s when the people concerned don’t really want to hear what God has to say to them. Blaming the church is a convenient way of ignoring God’s costly and demanding call.

We often feel that laws are made to restrict us, to stop us doing the things we like doing. Traffic laws stop us driving as fast as we’d like to. Taxation laws make us give money to the

government. And city by-laws forbid you to practise golf in a park where people are relaxing and enjoying themselves. It can seem very frustrating. But of course all these laws are made to protect people and to enable ordinary life to go on. If everyone drove too fast, there would be more accidents, people would get hurt and the roads would get blocked with crashed cars. If nobody paid their taxes, public services would cease to operate. If everybody did what they liked in a public park, nobody would enjoy it at all.

What was the purpose of the law, he asks. Was it to stop people doing things, or to enable people to do and be what God meant

them to do and be?

In other words, something that looks as though it’s breaking the sabbath has to be done even on that day, in order to make one tiny part of a baby boy’s body conform to God’s will. Now, supposing it’s possible to make a person’s entire body whole and sound on the sabbath: isn’t that even more important?

Underneath all this is Jesus’ regular charge against his contemporaries: that they were using certain aspects of the law to assure themselves that they really were God’s people, even if in fact they broke other aspects of it (verse 19).

Jesus’ reply is not what we expect. We imagine he’s going to insist that he is the Messiah, and so to insist as well that they don’t know where he has come from. But, as so often in this gospel, Jesus goes deeper than we, or his hearers, expect. He agrees that they do indeed know where he comes from – in other words, that he has come to Jerusalem from Galilee (see verses 40–52). But, instead of saying, as we might have imagined, ‘But you don’t know where I really come from’, meaning from God, he turns the

question round. They are indeed ignorant of something: but their real ignorance is not so much about him, Jesus, but about God. It isn’t that they do know God but aren’t sure if Jesus comes from God; it is, rather, that they don’t even know God, and so naturally cannot associate the Jesus they are seeing with the true God. The same challenge comes to today’s world. Often people look at Jesus and draw conclusions about him based on faulty ideas of God and the world. But the Christian message insists that people must learn afresh who God is, what the world is, and who we ourselves are, by looking at Jesus.

It will get deeper and deeper,

They misunderstand, as usual – and yet it isn’t a complete misunderstanding, because when Jesus is

‘glorified’ there will indeed be Greeks who come to faith in him (see, too, 12.20–23).

Thinking like this is a way of trying to hold on to a belief in God’s justice. If something in the world seems ‘unfair’, but if you believe in a God who is both all-powerful, all-loving and all-fair, one way of getting round the problem is to say that it only seems ‘unfair’, but actually isn’t. There was after all some secret sin being punished. This is a comfortable sort of thing to believe if you happen to be well-off, well fed and healthy in body and mind. (In other words, if nobody can accuse you of some secret previous sin.)

New creation always seems puzzling. Nobody in the story could quite figure out whether the man was the same or not.

In the same way, after Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples are faced with the astonishing question: is this really Jesus (20.19–29; 21.4–12)?

But in many cases fear on one side breeds fear on the other.

This didn’t just mean that they wouldn’t be able to join their fellow Judaeans in worship. The synagogue was the focus of the whole community. If you were put out of the synagogue, you’d probably be better off leaving the area altogether.)

True, maybe, but hardly the statement of a loving parent.

One of the most depressing things about war is the way in which both sides routinely invoke God on their side.

‘Give God the glory!’ they say to the man born blind – meaning, it seems, ‘if you have indeed been healed, it must have been God’s doing alone, and nothing to do with Jesus’. But John wants us to see that the man is giving God the glory, precisely by sticking to his story and insisting that Jesus had healed him. God must have been working through Jesus, he insists.

Verse 34 can’t mean simply that all human beings are ‘born in sin’, since that would have meant that the Pharisees were as well. The point they are making is that the man’s original physical state was a clear indication of his spiritual state.

Then it would take someone who understood what the artist was doing to decide whether things were in focus or not. And if someone said, ‘Oh, yes, that’s in focus’, when it wasn’t, everyone would be deceived. They might think, ever afterwards, that they had understood the painting when they hadn’t even seen it properly.

Not only are they wrong, but they have constructed a system within which they will never see that they are wrong. It is one thing to be genuinely mistaken, and to be open to new evidence, new arguments, new insights. It is another to create a closed world, like a sealed room, into which no light, no fresh air, can come from outside.

It is easy to be deceived. Only by checking

back to Jesus, over and over again, can we be quite sure that we are standing alongside the man born blind, in his new-found faith and openness to God’s light.

Somehow, unerringly, the mothers picked out the single voice of their own chick from the teeming, noisy crowd. It seemed like a miracle.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised. Perhaps all human voices sound alike to birds – yet a father or mother will recognize their child’s voice in a crowded room.

When they hear it, he won’t need a sheepdog to keep them in order. He won’t walk behind them, driving them on. He will walk ahead, calling them, and they will follow him. I’ve seen it done.

In the modern world we don’t think of rulers and leaders in quite that way. We think of people running big companies, of the presidents of banks and transnational corporations. We think of people sitting behind desks, dictating letters or chairing meetings. Often such people are quite removed from most of those who work

in the organization. They seldom see them face to face, and probably don’t know the names of very many.

Who are these false ones, these ‘thieves and brigands’, these ‘strangers’? Jesus almost certainly has in mind the various leaders who had emerged during his own lifetime. Some, whom we might call revolutionary leaders or warlords, were eager to lead Israel into confrontation with the imperial powers. Others, particularly the house of Herod, were eager to submit to Rome as long as that meant keeping

their own power and wealth. Jesus is posing the question: how will you tell God’s true, appointed king when he comes?

The emphasis is on the safety, and the fulfilled life, of the sheep.

Find a king like that, and you’ve found the Lord’s anointed.

Once people were really concerned about making something worthwhile, about building up a business, about looking after their workers. They would hope that their children would carry on the business after them, and go on contributing to the well-being of the local community. Now they don’t care. They can close a factory in one town and open another one a hundred miles away. As long as they get their bonus and share options they don’t worry about anything else.’

Now he declares that violent death is not just a dangerous possibility; it’s his vocation.

what use, after all, is a dead shepherd?

Behind this, all through, is the ancient prophecy in Ezekiel 34. There’s a strange thing in that chapter. Sometimes the prophet speaks of God becoming the true shepherd of Israel. But then, later, he speaks of David – in other words, of the Messiah – as the true shepherd, with God being God over shepherd and sheep alike. ‘Well, which is it?’ we want to ask Ezekiel. ‘Is God the shepherd, or is the Messiah the shepherd?’ He doesn

answer. He just points into the future. Only in this tenth chapter of John do we see how it all fits together. As Jesus will finally say in verse 30, ‘I and the father are one.’ God is the shepherd; the king is the shepherd. It makes sense in Jesus, and nowhere else.

The reality – the real question he was talking about when he spoke of himself as the good shepherd – was and is very different. It was and is all about power and rule, about God’s kingdom and the world’s kingdoms, about God appointing a true king, not where there had been a vacuum waiting for someone to fill it, but where there had been too many kings, too many rulers, and all of them anxious and ready to strike out at anyone trying to stake a new claim.

If they can’t draw the right conclusion from what he’s done, adding more words won’t do any good.

It is interesting to observe that where, in Christian thinking, people have become unclear on Jesus’ close relation to the father, they have often become unclear also on the certainty of Christian hope, and vice versa.