This Word must tell us about God. The Word that was God is spoken—to you. This reflection is not strange to Judaism. What is strange is the personification. Isaiah 55: God’s Word has its own reality. Both word and thing are expressed in dabar (Hebrew). The Word spoken is eternally existent. “My Word shall not return to me empty” (Habbakuk 3:5). Dabar can also be pestilence. Some read: before him went his word. This is tied into divine wisdom, a female figure. This figure is personified with God from the moment of creation. Both Proverbs and the Book of Wisdom give evidence of this. The Word is an emanation of God through which God creates. Wisdom creates things by God’s wisdom.
There is an increasing resistance to the use of the divine name. The Aramaic translation spoke of God’s “memra.” It became eventually a technical term (like Logos for us). To what degree did people sense this play on words?
Word is a term understood both in Greek and Judaic communities. The Word creates. The Word is the coming into being of life. Life here (verse 4) must be a reference to Genesis—God sharing his life with his creatures. And this life is the light of human beings. Verse 5 carries a question: Should it read “receive” or “overcome”? Or does the verse mean both?
Where does incarnation occur in this hymn? Not until after John the Baptist’s entrance. In verse 9 we hear of the coming of Jesus. With this comes a kind of pessimism of judgment. When John speaks of world, he speaks of those who do not receive Jesus. But those who accept him became God’s children. Light vs. Darkness. From then on he is speaking to his own.
Introductory Material: February 15, 1978
The author’s hope is to lead people to the light by bringing his own community to the truth. “And believing you may have life.” He has an almost unique purpose for writing: Is its thrust “come to faith” or “continue in faith”? It is probably the latter. John’s purpose is Christological. He is exploring the identity of Jesus Christ. This has come in part out of the community history. The real problem is the claim to divinity, which is rejected by the synagogue. John’s community is caused to suffer for its Christology.
Hence the Gospel becomes quite different. Jesus comes to tell of God and of God’s demands. There is no mention of the kingdom of God. In John, Jesus is the kingdom of God realized. Jesus is the mirror of God. So, we see the logic of the early church: Kingdom of God talk gives way quite early to Jesus talk. The act of faith centers on Jesus, not on the kingdom. This probably reflects outside interests, but also inner Christian questions as well. John is not satisfied to identify Jesus as the foundation of the community. Rather, Jesus is the vital principle of the community. Here the church is taking over the role of salvation. Jesus is the principle of life, the vine and the branches. If you are not a branch, you do not have life. Thus John has thrown out foundational language, in order to connect things to Jesus’ life rather than to his directives. John wants to mold, of words and deeds, the living truth for community life.
This must be a voice of warning, and complaint, as the institution grows. The Spirit is the presence of Jesus. Thus an abiding presence through spirit is affirmed, unperturbed by time and space. In his teaching, Jesus speaks of the most simple, temporal ideas for eternity.
Life is the term John gives to Jesus’ gift of God’s own life, and this life is the nature of the Christian message. For him, the natural life is not as real as the life Jesus gives. Real love is God’s, as with life. John talks quite realistically about eternal things. We receive God’s eternal life and nourish it with water and with food. This is not abstraction. It is concrete language about Jesus and as such it is a somewhat dangerous message.
John’s Christology brings him into conflict with other Christians. His pre-existent Logos is tough for people to swallow. Jesus’ followers never really understood Jesus fully. There is no mention of pre-existence in other books. Here there is a different sonship. Christology is not a matter of conception, but a matter of incarnation, based on the pre-existent principle.
5 / Two Brides
John 2:1–11
“These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).
I look out at the back hill which rises out from our summer home. The hillside once offered pasture to Holsteins and Guernseys, but now simply watches over valley and lake. To climb it, though, low as it is, does require energy and strength.
This year we will scale a far greater promontory, the highest peak in the Bible, which is the Gospel of John. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you with the choice of freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and—in choosing—to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination. More personally, this Gospel helps those who struggle with dislocation and disappointment. The Bride in Cana experienced dislocation, and so have you. The Bride of Christ experiences disappointment, and so have you.
The two basic historical problems of the New Testament are ancient cousins, first cousins to our two fundamental issues, the two existential battles in your salvation today.
The first historical problem behind our 27 books, and pre- eminently embedded in John, is the movement away from Judaism. How did a religious movement founded by a Jew, born in Judea, embraced by 12 and 500 within Judaism, expanded by a Jewish Christian missionary, become–-within 100 years–-entirely Greek? The books of the New Testament record in excruciating detail the development of this second identity, this coming of age, that came with the separation from mother religion.
The second historical problem underneath the Newer Testament is disappointment, the despair that gradually accompanied the delay, finally the cancellation, of Christ’s return, the delay of the parousia. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Paul expected to be alive to see the advent of Christ. Gradually, though, the church confessed disappointment in its greatest immediate hope, the sudden cataclysm of the end.
These two problems, historical and fascinating, create our New Testament: the separation from Judaism and the delay of the parousia. In the fourth Gospel the two come together with great ferocity. What makes this matter so urgent for us is that these very two existential dilemmas—one of identity and one of imagination—are before every generation, including and especially our own.
How do I become a real person? How do we weather lasting disappointment? How do I grow up? How do we become mature? What insight do I need, amid the truly harrowing struggles over identity, to become the woman or man I was meant to become? What imagination—what hope molded by courage—do we need to face down the profound despair of nuclear twilight and break free into a loving global future?
Dislocation and disappointment. More than any other document in ancient Christianity, John explored the first of these great dilemmas. More than any other document in Christianity, John faced the second.
The Bride in Cana: The Battle with Dislocation
Some years ago after a particularly warm July wedding, we had the opportunity to join newlyweds, families, and friends at an evening reception. A wedding folds two worlds into one new creation, and does so with alarming speed. It is quite amazing what can happen in forty minutes. During dinner a round, large man accosted me to say, “Nice service Reverend. But I have two words for you: ‘air conditioning.’” We then enjoyed the round of food and drink, of dance and music, none of which really has changed very much since Jesus went up to Cana in the north country of Galilee. Roles have changed. Power shifts have occurred. The age of betrothal, the economics of the household, the rhythms of procreation, the status of women, the frequency of divorce—all these have changed. The wedding banquet is about the same. It was in this sort of universal spirit that my new, large and round