Gospel of John

I Could Sing of Your Love Forever (Vineyard Music)

John writes his gospel as an older man keen to share his wisdom with a younger generation. He wanted to preserve his memories of Jesus and his mature reflections on them. Many of us, who are older, feel the same urge to share our experiences with the young. This gospel speaks to people like us who love Jesus and want to follow Him more closely. This is the last of the four gospels to be written, so we might suppose John assumed we know the story of Jesus. He has selected incidents in the life of Jesus that demonstrate His divinity and he leaves out much that we find in the other three gospels.

If anyone wishes to learn the true. doctrine respecting the “Messiah, the Son of God,” expressed in simple language, but with most sublime conceptions; to learn the true nature and character of God, and the way of approach to his mercy-seat; to see the true nature of Christian piety, or the source and character of religious consolation; to have perpetually before him the purest model of character the world has seen, and to contemplate the purest precepts that have ever been delivered to man, he cannot do it better than by a prayerful study of the Gospel by John. (Barnes)

This gospel account “was given by inspiration of God to John, brother of James, one of the twelve apostles.” (MH) He called himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” He never refers to himself by name. The John mentioned in the gospel is the one we call the Baptist, a cousin of Jesus. The gospel was written at Ephesus near the end of the first century when the Apostle John was some 80 years old. He was likely a young man during the ministry of Jesus.

“There would be, probably, in the first generation after the life of Christ an oral Gospel, in which all the chief events of His life and the chief discourses were preserved. In different Churches different parts would be committed to writing, and carefully preserved, and compared with similar writings elsewhere. Such documents doubtless existed at Ephesus, and John had access to them; but it is to his personal remembrance of Christ’s life and work, and his residence in Jerusalem, and his close union with the Virgin Mary, that we are to trace his special information. Mary, and his own mother Salome, and Mary Magdalene, and Nicodemus, and the family of Bethany, and the Church at Jerusalem, are the sources from which he would have learnt of events beyond his personal knowledge.” (Ellicott)

The book is usually divided into the Prologue (1:1 to 1:18), the Book of Signs (1:19 to 12:50), and the Book of Glory (13:1 to 21:25). The prologue suggests that the gospel was written response to a common heresy that Jesus was no more than a man. Matthew Henry tells us that John wrote his Gospel to assure us “that Jesus Christ is God, one with the Father.” Near the end of the gospel, John gives as his purpose, “that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

Adam Clarke thought it “more likely that he wrote for the express purpose of giving the Jews, his countrymen, proper notions of the Messiah and His kingdom; and to prove that Jesus, who had lately appeared among them, was this Christ.” My experience is that those who have immersed themselves in the study of this Gospel have discovered the secret of the steady, Christian life of love and service. To this end, I believe the evangelist wrote his Gospel.

Tradition calls us to picture the evangelist as “the flying eagle, so high does he soar, and so clearly does he see into divine and heavenly things.” (MH) It is not so much narrative history that we seek when reading this gospel, as we might when reading the gospel according to Luke. Rather, we are seeking to understand who Jesus is, why he became a man, died, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. In this sense, it is a spiritual gospel.

We discover that Jesus was not a man elevated to deity or made divine or sent by God to show us what it means to be holy. Rather, in the Prologue we learn that God came into the world as a man. Jesus proved his divinity by the signs he carried out during his ministry, speaking with the authority of God. Again and again, he tries to teach his disciples that “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” (John 14:9) In the Book of Glory, he prepares his followers for the time to come, after his death and resurrection, promising them “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.” (John 14:26)

Calvin reminds us “that nowhere else [but in the Gospel] can true and solid happiness be obtained, and that in him we have all that is necessary for the perfection of a happy life. One of my favorite verses is John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” This abundant life “shines, to spread abroad the rays of joy.” (Calvin) For this reason, we call the Gospel, “good news.”

Yet, what a Christian means by the abundant life is not what much of the world seeks in “its fading riches and pleasure [and] the empty enjoyments of the world.” (Calvin) It is a deeper, abiding love of God and man that flows out from the Spirit within us, as living water. In the Gospel of John, as in the other Gospels, we see Jesus always acting in love with great compassion. This is the kind of life he wants us to have.

We find in the Gospel not a “bare history.” We discover that “the Evangelists do not merely relate that Christ was born, and that he died and vanquished death, but also explain for what purpose he was born, and died, and rose again, and what benefit we derive from those events.” (Calvin) The Synoptic Gospels of Mathew, Mark, and Luke present the doctrine of Christ, John “points out to us the power and benefit of the coming of Christ [and] is far more clearly exhibited by him than by the rest… this Gospel is a key to open the door for understanding the rest.” (Calvin)

“The Fourth Gospel contains no record of the institution of Holy Baptism or of the Eucharist. This will not surprise us if we remember that it belonged to a generation later than the journeys and letters of St. Paul, in which we find that both sacraments had become part of the regular life of the Church… The whole Gospel is, so to speak, sacramental. The Word became flesh, and the whole life in the flesh was a manifestation which the physical eye could look upon and the physical ear could hear, that by means of these senses the human spirit may perceive the nature of the Eternal Spirit in whose image it was made. The spiritual was manifested in material form, that in it the spiritual nature of man embodied in material form may have communion with God.” (Ellicott)