John 6:35-38
Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.
Last week we began our journey into the fourth gospel. In truth we don’t actually know who wrote any of the gospels, but for convenience sake we use the traditional names ascribed to them—for this gospel that name is John—John the Apostle, John son of Zebedee (even though modern scholars find this a highly unlikely identification since this gospel was written in good Greek and employs a sophisticated theology unlikely to have been known to a simple Galilean fisherman.)
We began last week by discussing some of the surface differences that set John’s gospel apart from the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I said at that time that we’d be covering more of the differences as we go along. We will eventually get to the “stories” of Jesus, but before we can do that we must deal with the main issue of the things that set John’s gospel so far apart from the others, because those differences are not simply matters of style, but of substance. They are the reason this gospel exists.
This account comes, not just from one man, but from a community, and it is based in the belief that comes from this community. But that communal account appears to have been strictly edited by one man with an agenda – condensing and distilling from that communal account to reveal that absolute truth of who, what, and why Jesus existed among us.
The writer here isn’t setting out to write fiction or history, his narrative is as historically based as any other gospel, but his goal is persuasion, not a history of a certain time and place. This is why we can’t read this gospel as historical narrative as we do the synoptics. John doesn’t care about when things happened or why or in what order. Those things are irrelevant to him. All John cares about is that we learn his truth of Jesus through each event.
John’s gospel was never meant to be a general history lesson, it is testimony—a testimony as to what Jesus had become – how he was now seen in the early-Christian communities such as John’s around the year AD 90, sixty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, when this gospel was most likely written. John wrote this testimony in a particularly rich and expressive language which touched people then and has touched us and shaped our Christian belief ever since.
The language of this gospel is full of symbolic words and idioms which describe Jesus in phrases that touch our hearts and spirits and not just our brains: “I am the bread of life” is not a logical sentence. How can we describe a person as a piece of bread? – but still we know what the writer means. These words touch something deep inside us that show us who Jesus is. We may not completely understand it in rational thought – but we know instinctively what it means. Other phrases, such as “Here is the Lamb of God” or “I am the Light of the World,” these are not everyday descriptive words, they are symbols that reach us on a deep level.
As we read John we’ll find that he uses other phrases that also speak in a similar symbolic language—phrases such as “on the third day” which are used throughout scripture, not just in John. “One the third day” is not simply a chronological marker – it is a phrase that signifies something important is happening. Truly significant things always happen on the third day.
Another such “pay attention” phrase is anything using “wedding” or “marriage.” Yes, these may sometimes simply be referring to an actual marriage, but all the way through the bible God’s relationship with God’s people is often likened to marriage vows and the mutual care that goes with them.
As I’ve said before, John’s is an especially “wordy” gospel, and we will hopefully be noticing, as we read, that many of John’s words have symbolic meanings. Let’s agree now that as we study here we will pay attention to what we’re hearing so that we get not only the surface meanings, but also the deeper understandings that this writer intends so that we can know, not only the Jesus we’ve always known from the synoptics but also this infinitely great Jesus that John and his community of believers came to know and love.
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