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

by Tom Wright

this book is like a pool that’s safe for a child to paddle in but deep enough for an elephant to swim in.

These opening verses are, in fact, such a complete introduction to the book that by the time you get to the story you know a good deal about what’s coming, and what it means. It’s almost as though the long driveway contained signs with pictures of the various rooms in the house and the people you were going to meet there.

The gateway to the drive is formed by the unforgettable opening words: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ At once we know that we are entering a place which is both familiar and strange. ‘In the beginning’ – no Bible reader could see that phrase and not think at once of the start of Genesis, the first book in the Old Testament: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ Whatever else John is going to tell us, he wants us to see his book as the story of God and the world, not just the story of one character in one place and time. This book is about the creator God acting in a new way within his much-loved creation. It is about the way in which the long story which began in Genesis reached the climax the creator had always intended.

In Genesis 1, the climax is the creation of humans, made in God’s image. In John 1, the climax is the arrival of a human being, the Word become ‘flesh’.

John probably expects some readers to see that this opening passage says, about Jesus himself, what some writers had said about ‘Wisdom’. Many Jewish teachers had grappled with the age-old questions: How can the one true God be both different from the world and active within the world?

God had promised to place his own ‘presence’ within the Temple in Jerusalem. Others saw them enshrined in the Jewish law, the Torah. All of this, as we shall see, is present in John’s mind when he writes of God’s ‘Word’.

But the idea of the Word would also make some of his readers think of ideas that pagan philosophers had discussed. Some spoke of the ‘word’ as a kind of principle of rationality, lying deep within the whole cosmos and within all human beings. Get in touch with this principle, they said, and your life will find its true meaning. Well, maybe, John is saying to them; but the Word isn’t an abstract principle, it’s a person. And I’m going to introduce you to him.

Verses 1–2 and 18 begin and end the passage by stressing that the Word was and is God, and ...

That’s the theme of this gospel: if you want to know who the true God is, look long and hard at Jesus.

The one we know as Jesus is identical, it seems, with the Word who was there from the very start, the Word through whom all things were made, the one who contained and contains life and light. The Word challenged the darkness before creation and now challenges the darkness that is found, tragically, within creation itself.

The Word is bringing into being the new creation, in which God says once more, ‘Let there be light!’

when God sends the Word into the world, the world pretends it doesn’t recognize him. Indeed, when he sends the Word specifically to Israel, the chosen people don’t recognize him. This is the central problem which dominates the whole gospel story. Jesus comes to God’s people, and Go...

the law, given by Moses, points in the right direction, but, like Moses himself, it doesn’t take us to the promised land. For that, you need the grace and truth that c...

If we are to meet the Word of God, all four gospels suggest we do well to begin by considering John the Baptist.

John, like many New Testament writers but in his own particular way, wants us to understand the events concerning Jesus as a new, and better, Exodus story. Just as God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, so God was now bringing a new people out of an even older and darker slavery. But who is this new people? In the original Exodus story, Israel is rescued from the dark powers of the world, which in that case meant the Egyptians under Pharaoh. But now, according to John, God’s lamb is going to take away the sin of the world itself. This can only mean that God’s rescue operation is moving out, wider than just Israel, to embrace the whole of creation.

Again and again in John’s gospel we will see the ancient people of God, not least their rulers and self-appointed guardians of tradition, missing the meaning of what Jesus is doing, while people on the edges, outside the boundaries, get the point and find themselves forgiven, healed, brought in by God’s transforming love. This is what we are to understand when John the Baptist points Jesus out as ‘God’s lamb, taking away the world’s sin’.

Only when the lamb has been killed for the world’s sins can the spirit of the living God be poured out on his people. Only when the Temple has been made clean and ready – the Temple of human hearts, polluted by sin and rebellion – can the presence of God come and live there. So, on the evening of the first Easter Day, Jesus breathes on his disciples, giving them his own spirit, his own breath, to be theirs (20.21–23).

flesh. But when we put ourselves back into the minds of the eager Galileans and Judaeans coming to John for baptism, we realize that they would understand the phrase to mean that Jesus was the Messiah, the true king, who would free Israel from pagan domination.

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.