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

by Tom Wright

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’.

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.

The signs are all occasions when Jesus did, you might say, what he’d just promised Nathanael that he would do.

They are moments when, to people who watch with at least a little faith, the angels of God are going up and coming down at the place where Jesus is. They are moments when heaven is opened, when the transforming power of God’s love bursts in to the present world.

It matters that it happened, of course. Sadly, there are many, inside the church as well as outside, whose present state suggests that one ought to go back to examine whether in fact a real spiritual birth took place at all. But where there are signs of life it’s more important to feed and nurture it than to spend much time going over and over what happened at the moment of birth.

the evil which was and is in the world, deep-rooted within us all, was somehow allowed to take out its full force on Jesus. When we look at him hanging on the cross (or ‘lifted up’, as John says here and several times later in the gospel; the cross is an ‘elevation’, almost a ‘glorification’), what we are looking at is the result of the evil in which we are all stuck. And we are seeing what God has done about it. We