It sure would be nice if we could ask the author of John's gospel his thoughts on what Jesus means, but of course we cannot. But that doesn't mean we have no interpretive window where we might look for insights. For example, it is typical for people in our day to think of Scripture as a way of communicating Christian faith to non-believers, and there are any number of organizations committed to getting Bibles to people as an evangelical strategy. But the first readers of John's gospel would not of have thought this way at all.
None of the New Testament was written for the general public. These were in-house documents, used by insiders only. By itself, this raises the question of whether Jesus' statement about "No one" refers to no one in all creation or to no one of you, the community of faith.
I also wonder if it makes any difference that Jesus says "the Father" rather than God. Clearly the people of John's community had encountered God's love through Jesus in way that transformed their understanding of God. This new thing was totally dependent on Jesus, but that is not the same thing as saying, "All other religious experience is invalid."
Another question is the status of John's community as tiny, endangered minority compared to the powerful and often privileged situation of the Church in the Western World. How well do the bold, even defiant claims of one small community translate into universal truths? And what about the fact that John's Jewish community is locked in a struggle with fellow Jews who have not embraced Jesus? Do these intrafaith debates translate into larger interfaith dialogues?
I am not meaning to suggest a religious relativism that says all experiences of God are equally valid. Like John's community, I too know God through Jesus, and I experience God in my life as Jesus "abides" in me via the Spirit. I have no other way to know the God that I do, and I feel quite free to reject any religious claim that presents a god who is contrary to this loving God I know in Christ. But does that mean that having the correct Christological labels is the key?
There's an oft quoted statement from Gandhi that goes, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." I can't help but think this comment might encourage Christians to read Jesus' words from today's gospel more as a tool for internal critique than for external judgments. If we Christians don't look like Christ, it seems that we are the ones who don't know the way to the Father.
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Thank you for this. I agree. Maybe you would be interested in this book about John - The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple: A Work in Two Editions, by Herman C. Waetjen. t&t clark, 2005. He talks, as he does in his other works about Matthew and Mark, about the "narrative world" of the gospels and the need to understand that it is different from the "real" world in which Jesus was alive -- that we can see and understand their claims about Jesus as the Christ more clearly when we understand their context. Anyway, I'm still reading it and it will probably take me years, so that's it for now. Oh - except the main point: he's convinced that Lazarus was the Beloved Disciple, which I like but it's edgy -- and that the later editors in Ephesus, who created 21, tried to write that out and replace him with John. Ok, that's the extent of my intake right now.
ReplyDeleteRachel Clark
Thanks, Rachel. Not familiar with the Waetjen work, but sounds interesting.
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