John

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”    —  The Gospel of John

That sentence, the opening of the account of Jesus written by John, who has the unique place in Christian history as the disciple whom Jesus loved, is a leap of vision and daring beyond all description.  The writers of the other three Gospels framed their stories as accounts of Jesus and his work on earth; Mark jumps into the story three years before Jesus’ crucifixion, while both Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies—Matthew back to Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people, and Luke draws a line from Jesus back to the first human beings.

But John points to something in a realm beyond all this; John tells us that Jesus’ life has no beginning and no end.  Not only is Jesus beyond time, he is synonymous with God:  “All things were made through him, and without him was not made anything that was made.”  Even time itself is his creation.

I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as a rather bold statement.  Now, as Easter approaches, I ask myself what could compel a person to write such a thing…and to believe it.

The answer is:  the Resurrection.

John’s eloquence as a writer is stupendous; while Mark’s Gospel reflects Peter’s personality (scholars believe Peter was Mark’s main source) and is straightforward and immediate, John’s sings with flights of lyricism and vision:  “For God so loved the world that He gave his only son, that whosoever believes him him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Hanging on the cross, Jesus looked down and saw his mother beside John and told them they were now to treat each other as mother and son.

So if Jesus loved John, and trusted him with his own mother, and inspired him to write such things, John must have been someone we’d all love and admire, right?

Wrong.  Jesus loved John, but the other disciples did not—or at least they sometimes found him intolerable.  John and his brother James, when they saw that massive crowds were following Jesus and they felt Jesus would be setting up a powerful kingdom—here on earth—they went behind the backs of the other disciples and asked to be designated as Jesus’ main men when he came to power.  That didn’t sit well with Jesus, or the rest of the disciples.

Still John had a special place.  And he wasn’t perfect.

I have two friends right now who struggle with perfection—or rather their lack of it.  One is Catholic, the other Protestant, and yet their problem is the same:  because of their on-going inability—or unwillingness; it’s beyond me to judge which—to purge sin from their lives, they can’t allow themselves to participate fully in worship.

As I say, I can’t judge.  What I can say is that all of Jesus’ followers were flawed; none of them expected Jesus to rise from death.

And he did.

-Randall