Philo of Alexandria, contemporary with Jesus, whose thought came from both Judaism and Plato, especially in the use of logos, wrote, “to his Word, his chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator.”18 For Christians the life of Jesus means exactly the opposite, not separation but unity, as John consistently witnesses to. Incarnation means exactly that. Jesus walks with us along the fault lines of our human experience.
Rather than “crossing” the boundary, Jesus lives on the boundary. Better still, he is the boundary, the “gate” through which we go back and forth (John 10:7, 9). It is through him and within him that we can move and live, travel the boundaries within ourselves and between others. In Christ! When we are dealing with our psychic nature, this is the John theme par excellence.
My thought is that there is chapter by chapter a revealing of the process, of going through “gates” with Christ, that occurs in us step by step as we move from distrust to trust, and from not having Christ to having him. When you hear, see these steps, you will respond, will be able to respond. You can respond. This is the way to respond, this is the way you will be enabled to respond. We can experience the gospel, and the Gospel, as the expression of energy that will work in a dynamic way within us and between us. It is the nature of the rich and laden narrative to achieve this. For instance, John’s metaphors, misunderstandings, double meanings, and ironies prompt us to ask, make us ask, “What is going on here?” The invitation is the same—come higher, go deeper—here in this way Jesus gives himself to you. We search for the realities beneath the appearance, “to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true, believe that and live by it.”19
Re-experiencing the text depends on our capacity for imagination so that what has been concretely located can now be relocated in contemporary experience.
3. Language
We need language to build an adequate picture of things.20
A large proportion of investment in studying John is spent on “hearing” the language. This means a moderate attempt to both translate and listen to the Greek. I have tried to help those with no knowledge of Greek by including pointers to Greek words. This is needed less as we move through the chapters because we become familiar with words that appear time and time again. Words are transliterated for two reasons: so that we can hear the similarities of sound in the original, and also so that we can see that different English words in the translation may in fact be the same Greek root. It means also having an intensely attentive ear for the nuances of John’s language. The sight of the Greek word also makes connections to other places where John has used it, and thus illustrates the way themes weave in and out of the tapestry. His use of imagery and metaphor is fluid and allows the mingling of ideas. John is like a tapestry with colors and images and threads now surfacing and now hidden. Ronald Ferguson writes of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, “George was captivated by the notion of divine creativity in the weaving of tapestries, the threads of which were the raw materials of human life and history.”21 John’s tapestry in addition weaves in the divine life. The “process of reading is to become attuned to the profusion of textual indicators which between them weave the meanings of the narrative . . . to decipher the inner story within the outer story.”22 Astonishingly, in the process we will weave ourselves into the tapestry!
In terms of making sense of language, there is an unavoidable fundamental problem. It is partly related to the life situation of the Johannine community, but it is also totally general.
When sacred texts develop to express and define group identity in a context of conflict, they often crystallize these idealizations and projections and preserve them in written form. While these formulations may be appropriate in the formative stages of the religious community, it sets the stage for future distortions. As Paul Ricoeur has observed, something significant happens when communication moves from speech to text. In dialogue, it is possible to clarify ambiguity by direct reference to the surroundings. Once a communication moves into text, however, the direct referential context is lost, and the multiple significances inherent in written language make a variety of interpretations possible.23
The plain fact is, of course, that we can’t hear the words as spoken. There is no intonation in the New Testament! Yet the way we communicate is by intonation. A distinguished scholar reading a passage in John containing direct speech was already interpreting the meaning because he read with his own intonation. It was loaded with his own view of the character. There is no other way! Every time the language is read aloud we add in our own view. So much of our faith is based, not on what the written words say, but on how we read them. When we want to read afresh, even in our own heads, we must try out all sorts of possibilities of varied tonal voice and emphasis. Every piece of speech was originally spoken in a particular way, and we have no access to it. We simply do not know how the words were said. (And, of course, there is the question of how far John represents what Jesus and others actually said, and how—and the intonation running in his head whilst writing!) When reading text, we have to start with our own ignorance, our own “not knowing.”
Inscribed on a pavement slab outside a bookshop in Inveraray, Scotland, is, “In the river of words ideas are eddies spinning downstream.” In John we could also reverse it—in the river of ideas, words are eddies spinning downstream! To sail the sea of Johannine faith is to launch into a sea of metaphors and images—staying, water, birth, seeing, witnessing, breath, spirit, light, dark. Words such as these appear to be simple comparisons, when in reality “the images metaphors embody may originate in layers of thought that are usually inaccessible to inspection.” It is not only the words that are repeated over and over again, but the metaphorical sense reappears again and again. We do not experience the images solely with cold reason; “Figurative language springs from strong affect.”24 To refresh ourselves at St. John’s well is to need to sense the imagery afresh.
Metaphors in common usage become faded. So, for example, the word “anatomy” in the title Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design might enter our minds as, say, just meaning “the parts of,” or “the elements in,” or “structure of,” or, picking up the word “design,” “the plan of.” Whereas if the metaphor itself came alive for us, we would be “image-ining” flesh, blood, eyes, sinews, muscle, breath, heart, bone, movement, a living being, sickness, the wrong sort of growth, dying! John’s metaphors are not used merely as illustrations of propositions; they do not simply refer to theological concepts. They are much too dense for that. They are poetic; in imagination we experience a reality beyond our formulations; such experience is authentic. Culturally we have to live with the anomaly of having concrete statements that we do not interpret literally—Jesus as “the Son of God,” or “the Father,” for instance. In getting into John, we continually have to live in the metaphor afresh, without retreating into the fundamentalism of previous eras or contemporary literalism. When everything seems so familiar, we find we have to live on the edge of language.
This seeking of a deeper meaning is not unknown to biblical interpretation. From the earliest Christian times, the text was deemed to have two levels of meaning, a “literal” (historia in Greek) and a “spiritual” (theoria). The latter required insight into the symbolic, the hidden, even esoteric, meaning. “[T]he worldview of the early church led the early Christians to a more introverted attitude that directed their gaze into the world of the soul, which for them was a living reality . . . the early Christian commentators were natural depth psychologists.”25 “What is hidden beneath the literal meaning is not merely another and more hidden meaning, it is also a new and totally different reality . . . It is the divine life itself.”26 So this “interpretation” does involve us in looking back on an ancient text through very modern lenses, and through lenses, in particular, that are therapeutically attuned.
The art of interpretation is called hermeneutics, from the Greek word hermeneuo, “to interpret,” as used by Jesus in Luke 24:27 as he interpreted the scriptures on the way to Emmaus. “Hermeneutics is not