John for Everyone Part 1 (New Testament for Everyone Book 5)

by Tom Wright

But, though it’s imposing in its structure and ideas, it’s not meant to scare you off. It makes you welcome. Indeed, millions have found that, as they come closer to this book, the Friend above all friends is coming out to meet them.

Like someone learning to listen to music, we have to be able to hear the different parts as well as the glorious harmony that they produce when put together.

When you go looking for Jesus, and discover that he’s looking for you, you will remember that day for ever.

Humankind as a whole has been smitten with a deadly disease. The only cure is to look at the son of man dying on the cross, and find life through believing in him.

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.

Precisely because evil lurks deep within each of us, for healing to take place we must ourselves be involved in the process.

Believing in Jesus means coming to the light, the light of God’s new creation. Not believing means remaining in the darkness. The darkness (and those who embrace it) must be condemned, not because it offends against some arbitrary laws which God made up for the fun of it, and certainly not because it has to do with the material, created world rather than with a supposed ‘spiritual’ world. It must be condemned because evil is destroying and defacing the present world, and preventing people coming forward into God’s new world

But the point of the whole story is that you don’t have to be condemned. You don’t have to let the snake kill you. God’s action in the crucifixion of Jesus has planted a sign in the middle of history. And the sign says: believe, and live.

John the evangelist also intends us to see, not for the last time in the gospel, the way in which different characters in the story of Jesus have to learn, as C. S. Lewis once put it, to play great parts without pride and small parts without shame.

So too, today: who do people trust? Who do they listen to and follow? All too often, alas, they trust those whose message has no breath of heaven about it, no sign of life from the hidden dimension of God’s world.

The end of that road is wrath, not because God is a tyrant or a bully but because earth, and all that is earthbound, will corrupt and decay.

the phrase ‘living water’. That’s the regular phrase people used in Jesus’ world for what we call ‘running’ water–water in a stream or river, rather than a pool or well, water that’s more likely to be fresh and clean than water that’s been standing around getting stagnant.

she’s in for a shock–as is everyone who starts to take Jesus seriously. He has living water to offer all right, but when you start to drink it it will change every area of your life.

If anything, it’s our surrounding culture that brainwashes us, persuading us in a thousand subtle ways that the present world is the only one there is. This is seldom argued. Rather, a mood is created in which it seems so much easier to go with the flow. That’s what happens in brainwashing. 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. I can hear the voices, again and again. ‘Well, we used to go to the church in town, but then my aunt said we should go with her, and then I didn’t like the minister’s wife, and now we’ve stopped going altogether.’

And here, two thousand years ago, the same tone of voice. ‘I was brought up to think that this mountain, here in Samaria, was God’s holy mountain. But you Jews think yours is the right one.’ Implication: we can’t both be right, maybe nobody knows, maybe nothing is that certain, and maybe (the hidden punchline of the argument) the morality we were taught is equally uncertain.

In fact, part of the point of Jesus’ mission, to bring the life of heaven to birth on earth, was that from now on holy mountains wouldn’t matter that much. This wasn’t a new insight. When Solomon dedicated the Temple a thousand years before, he was quite clear that heaven itself wasn’t big enough for God, so that one single building couldn’t hope to contain him. 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.

‘One day the Messiah will come,’ she says brightly. ‘Why don’t we wait till then? He’ll make it all clear.’ That is, of course, the equivalent of a football player kicking the ball enthusiastically towards his own net, without realizing that the goalkeeper isn’t there. ‘That’s me,’ says Jesus. And he goes on saying it. Whenever people come round to the key questions, and say, ‘If only someone would come and sort it all out!’, then there he is. ‘That’s me.’ Waiting to do what he does best.

Indeed, they have given Jesus a title which, as they may have known, the emperor in far-away Rome had begun to use for himself: saviour of the world.

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? 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?

When you point the finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you. He hasn’t said the law of Moses was wrong; only that, if we’re going to get serious about it, we should all find ourselves guilty. And one by one they get the point and go away.

Are you ever tempted to reject the light? As you read John 8, do you ever find yourself siding with the Pharisees? Have we all, perhaps, allowed ourselves to forget just how deep the darkness goes within each of us, not least when we are called to be God’s people for the world but decide to turn this calling into a privilege for ourselves?