Every once in a while we find ourselves reading John's gospel stories of Jesus. They are so very different from other version!  I wonder why that is? I wonder are we talking about the same person? John’s Gospel needs more investigating of its uniqueness as a Biblical resource for our faith.   John’s accounts of the Jesus story are very different and distinctive…just like some of your faith stories are different from the person next to you. 

In the beginning of the Bible, in the first Creation story from Genesis,  God  is speaking creation into existence.  God speaks the word “Let there be…..”   and it happens: light, day and night, oceans and land, trees and grasses…    Everything called into existence by God’s spoken word, representing God’s energy or power.

And so for the writer of John’s Gospel, in deliberate parallel to the opening words of Genesis, God speaks salvation into existence.  This time the word of God takes a human form and enters history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  And he speaks the word and it happens:  water into wine, forgiveness and judgement, healing and understanding, blindness into vision, death into life……and more.  And different from the other Gospels Jesus speaks salvation through conversations and personal relationships, and compassionate responses and prayer, and ultimately in his death and resurrection.

This last of the four Gospels to be written tells us of some lengthy conversations and events involving Jesus.  No short pointed parables in this gospel version, and yet this author was a master story-teller.

It would appear that this Gospel came to be written in a time and place that Christian followers were being excluded from places of worship, becoming spiritually homeless, in some sense.  How could they survive?  What hope would carry them along?  This Gospel author addressed their crisis by retelling the
Jesus-story and drawing out the parallels with their experience.

John used symbols and metaphors, evident from the opening words, and with his story of the wedding in Cana, where ordinary water tasted like amazing new wine, the wine of joy in Jesus’ presence (John chapter 2, lines 1-11).

In John, the miracles of Jesus are called ‘signs’.  They become signs to a new reality of life with a living God, seen especially in the life and impact of Jesus.  With him everything changes, and many things become possible, revealing God’s will.  In story, John told these truths and stretched people to experience faith in God, “outside the box” of what they had previously believed.   (John’s Gospel is certainly “outside the box” of the other written gospels.)   For example, we read that even an older, wise man, Nicodemus, could be reborn,  an in-and-out-of-relationships woman could be granted living water, even blind eyes could be made to see again, and the lonely and despairing could be comforted by a good shepherd, and those hungry for abundant life could find ‘the bread of life’. Even death could be conquered. 

Story after story, image after image, showed that life with Jesus was radically and wonderfully different.  This gospel is a divine drama, where truth is found at a level beyond the literal, beyond a schedule of actual events, and yet found in the mix of human lives.

John’s Gospel stretched minds and spiritual yearnings when first read long ago, and it still has that potential now and in some of the challenging and critical times we’ll face.                   

This Gospel gives marvelous insights, and powerful language, to build our faith upon, moving us into discoveries of life with Jesus, and stretching us:

·         Into experiences of joy, when it feels like we’re running empty,

·         into places of mercy and understanding, when we feel excluded and boxed in,

·         into places of clear sight and hope where we might feel blinded and in the dark,

·         into places of reassurance of a way through life and truth, when we might feel lost,

·         into places of incredible confidence that not even in death does God let go of us

... and more

When we are guided by John’s gospel we need to be ready to be stretched outside the box of our routine lives…as the last verse of the gospel says, 

“BUT THERE ARE MANY OTHER THINGS THAT JESUS DID;   IF EVERY ONE OF THEM WERE WRITTEN DOWN, I SUPPOSE THAT THE WORLD ITSELF COULD NOT CONTAIN THE BOOKS THAT COULD BE WRITTEN.”                                       ……………………….That’s’ a lot of stretching……………………….