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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom Wright
Read between
October 8 - October 13, 2021
That’s the theme of this gospel: if you want to know who the true God is, look long and hard at Jesus.
The Word challenged the darkness before creation and now challenges the darkness that is found, tragically, within creation itself.
the law, given by Moses, points in the right direction, but, like Moses himself, it doesn’t take us to the promised land.
In particular, here in John’s gospel, he points him out as ‘God’s lamb’. And with that he indicates, at the very start of the gospel story, how things are going to end, and why. Jesus is to die a sacrificial death for the sins of the world.
What Andrew and Simon Peter thought they were doing was looking for the Messiah. What they didn’t realize was that the Messiah was looking for them.
When you’re with Jesus, it is as though you’re in the house of God, the Temple itself, with God’s angels coming and going, and God’s own presence there beside you.
The whole point of the ‘signs’ is that they are moments when heaven and earth intersect with each other. (That’s what the Jews believed happened in the Temple.)
It is about transformation: the different dimension of reality that comes into being when Jesus is present
The wedding is a foretaste of the great heavenly feast in store for God’s people (see Revelation 21.2).
When they ask what he thinks he’s up to, and request some kind of sign to show them what it all means, he speaks, very cryptically, about his own death and resurrection.
Once the story of Jesus has been told, the jury is out – on the hearers, not on Jesus himself.
What matters is not just what Jesus can do for you; what matters is who Jesus is.
How can something which enhances human life and brings dignity and hope to someone who hadn’t got much of either be against the good purposes of God and his good law?
Throughout the gospel it’s clear that Jesus had not basically come to judge the world, or Israel, or individuals; but it’s also clear that the fact of his coming to bring rescue, salvation, life and hope would inevitably have the effect of condemning those who didn’t want any of those things, those who were so steeped in evil that the coming of light was bad news for them, not good news.
As he has come to realize, at the heart of the Israel of his day there was a single great problem: they had forgotten who their God really was. Their behaviour, their attitudes and their ambitions indicated that they didn’t know the one Jesus called ‘father’; and that was why they couldn’t recognize him as having come from this one true God.
There is a worse slavery than that which they had suffered in Egypt, or the semi-slavery they were suffering under the rule of Rome. It is the slavery that grips not only individuals but also groups, nations and families of nations. It is the slavery we know as ‘sin’.
Jesus is so conscious of the father with him, working in him, speaking through him, that he can speak, in a kind of ecstasy of union, in the name of the father. ‘I Am’: one of the central meanings of YHWH, the secret and holy name of God.
The chaos and misery of this present world is, it seems, the raw material out of which the loving, wise and just God is making his new creation.
The definition of the true shepherd is that he isn’t in it for his own profit. In fact, the supreme test of what he’s in it for will come when he’s faced with a choice.
Now he declares that violent death is not just a dangerous possibility; it’s his vocation. And the best explanation of why this might be so is found, not in heavy volumes of abstract theology, but in this very parable,
But, as Israel’s prophets and wise writers had always hinted, the God of Israel was never interested only in Israel. His call to Israel was for the sake of the whole world. The ‘other sheep’ are that great company, from every nation under heaven, that God intends to save, and to save through Jesus.
The Gentiles are no longer the enemy. They are sheep who have not yet been brought into the sheepfold.
The point of calling Jesus ‘the good shepherd’ is to emphasize the strange, compelling power of his love.
As usual, he refers them instead to the works that he’s doing. If they can’t draw the right conclusion from what he’s done, adding more words won’t do any good.
Christian confidence about the future beyond death, in other words, is not a matter of wishful thinking, a vague general hope, or a temperamental inclination to assume things will turn out all right. It is built firmly on nothing less than the union of Jesus with the father – one of the main themes of this whole gospel.
The
