Reading Journal 2023: John: Responding to the Incomparable Story of Jesus (New Testament Everyday Bible Study Series)

Reading Journal 2023: John: Responding to the Incomparable Story of Jesus (New Testament Everyday Bible Study Series)
Author: Scot Mcknight

Mcknight’s commentary on John is part of his ongoing Everyday Bible Series. These are accessible commentaries that aim to blend an emphasis on current scholarship and pastoral concern. By design, these commentaries go verse by verse, breaking passages into bite size and digestible chunks via chapter breaks that can encourage a daily devotional approach.

One of the great things about these commmentaries is how deep they manage to dig in a fairly short amount of time. The format does face some challenges given John’s lengh; all the others I have read, save for Acts, have been on the epistles, which are considerably shorter. Unlike Acts, the thematic weight and sheer breadth of John’s Gospel is a lot, and you can feel the attempts to wrestle it down to fit and serve its format. I do think he finds success, relying largely on teasing out the patterns and points of repitition, but this does demand a bit more work and investment on the part of the reader.

Mcknight begins by noting the uniqueness of the Gospels in terms of literary text and genre in the sccriptures. He notes how the closest parallels are portions of Moses’ biography in the OT, or the different viignettes of the key figures in Israels story. This distances the Gospels from the prophetic texts in terms of interests and focus, an important distinction given how the Gospels exist in the tall shadow of the prophetic history. It represents a shift from “what the prophets said” to an obsessive take on “what Jesus did”. Given the Gospel allegiances to ancient biography and the Caesar Gospels, this becomes one of its most distinctive elements. When one considers how absent this emphasis on what Jesus did is in Paul’s letters, it becomes an even bigger point of consideration.

Mcknight then moves to explore the counter-intuititive nature of John’s Gospel. He suggests that in common approaches we come to the text with “a good idea of who God is” and then ask how Jesus fits into that given the nature of his actions and words in the Gospel. What John wants us to do is gain a good idea of who Jesus is and ask how that fits in to our conceptions of God. This is how faith is formed and expressed in the Gospel of John, faith which operates in conjunction with belief, which in the ancient mindset is understood as “ongoing abiding in who (Jesus) is. For John this is what it means to enter into the grand narrative of the “logos” made flesh. The very logos whom tabernacled amongst us. Here it is important to note how John’s Gospel is composed to reflect a new Genesis, or a new creation text. Less overt to modern readers is how it is also designed around the story of a new exodus. Mcknight does a good job of anchoring us in the ancient story of Israel as we go, the purpose of the Gospel being “to promote believing” in this story.

There is no escaping the long history of anti-semitism and bigotry that follows John’s Gospel in the pages of history, and Mcknight faces that head on. And he tackles this by employing one of this most popular forms of exegesis- learning how to read the story backwards. Here the point and context for the Gospel is stated in 20:30-31 and its emphasis on belief as a whole journey, as the living of the Gospel story. It is within this story then that John is interested in connecting the logos to God by way of consecutively drawn out relationships- John the Baptist, the world, to the coommunity of faith. Here John is using a Greek term and idea (logos) to evoke the timeless and eternal nature of the story of Israel. The Logos in John doesn’t “descend upon or enter into Jesus, the Logos of God became the human nature Jesus bore.” This is crucial to understanding the way the text “baptizes” the Greek term in the Jewish story. The Logos is alligned with the creator. It is “the light” and the very source of life. And in John, the relationship between the baptizeer and the son becomes a key part of the structure in terms of how these relationships function as signposts. This becomes important too when it comes to John’s emphasis on the “world”. So often people read John to suggest God against the Jews and God against the world. Not surprisingly this then results in common perceptions within Reformed circles that John is suggesting that the flip side is God’s sovereign purpose in narrowing the emphasis of God’s love to a “chosen” and select few. The faithful. Those who believe. But this misses what John is saying altogether, which is precisely why we need to learn how to read the Gospel backwards. To hold the Gospels aim and interest in view as we navigate the particularities of Johhns language. In John’s Gospel the “I am nots” parallel the “I ams” as an internalized structure meant to reveal Godself in Jesus. The same applies to the way the Gospel functions as in inward critique (speaking to and from the inside) pointing outwards. What tends to happen is that Christians come to this Gospel and assume an external position looking from the outside in towards the Jews and the world and the non-elect. But if they truly understood the nature of the internal critique they would recognize that such a reading only condemns themselves. And yet the purpose of the Gospel is to believe in a much different truth and a much different story.

“Who Jesus is also changes what it means to be human.” This is why the “all” phrases matter so deeply to John. “to callJesus Messiah is to affirm him as the consummation of Israel’s story”, and this consummation understands that this story is one that speaks to and for the world. We either trust this story or we don’t, and both postions have implications for how we then see not just the world around us, but what the nature of humanity and God. This is what is at the heart of the high priestly prayer. The implications of this, according to John, is quite literally what is behind the reactions to Jesus’ words and actions which send him to the cross. That Jesus is God afffects everything else. “What surprises the disciples in the midst of their chaos is Jesus’ word that they know the way, for they seem to think they don’t.” This is the very thing that should suprise us as readers. And its a surprise, if John has his way, something he hopes to root in the arrival of the Spirit, that should unsettle and disorient us from one perspective into another based on its revelatory force. “To serve Jesus” in John “means walking toward the cross of his death, but with the consciousness that the “Father will honor” that way of life. Not just honor, but redeem in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and ascencion. A truth that can only truly be underestood in the paatterns and motifs of the story of Israel. A story that is for the world, not against it.