for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life
for God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world
but that the world through him might be saved.
When I mentioned Proverbs 13:34, you probably had to look it up. I know I did. But you almost certainly knew the chapter and verse of this passage. The Gospel According To Saint John, The Third Chapter, The Sixteenth Verse.
For very many people of an evangelical bent Christianity is reducible to John's Gospel, and John's Gospel is reducible to its third chapter; and the third chapter is reducible to this verse. The Bible in a nutshell, they call it, very frequently. Some of them have it on teeshirts or tattooed on their arms. One American fellow used to show up at football matches with the reference -- not the quotation, just the reference -- on a placard. There's someone in Bristol right now fly-posting it on lamp-posts.
JOHN 3:16
Evangelicalism makes a very big deal out of the Bible. But in practice it all comes down to one Gospel, and one chapter of one Gospel and one verse of this one chapter. Advanced students probably added one verse of one chapter of one Epistle as well. But John 3:16 and Romans 3:23 is pretty much the whole kit and kaboodle. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.
The idea appeals to me very much. I like the idea of reducing complicated ideas to simple frames. The Hero's Journey. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We hold these truths to be self-evident. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Forty-two.
That's how we managed to convince ourselves that everything in the Old Testament was really about Jesus. Medieval exegetes thought that since loving God and loving your neighbour was the heart of the Law, it followed that any Old Testament passage could, by definition, be twisted so it either advocated Love or condemned Hate. They used a lot of allegory in this regard. We were equally sure that everything in the Bible pointed to John 3:16. Daniel rescued from the lions' den? That's to remind us that anyone who believes in Jesus will not perish but have eternal life. Noah and his family rescued from the big flood? People who believe in Jesus will not perish. Chapter after chapter of rules about Jewish temple ritual? It's there to remind us that God gave his only begotten son. The sheep and the goats are kind of like Jesus, in the same way that the metal snake is kind of like Jesus.
This was what my friend in the study group was thinking about, all those years ago when she wanted to abandon our study of Solomon and turn to John instead. John 3 was her faith. Proverbs 13, not so much. And in a way she wasn't wrong. God so loved the world that he gave his only son. If you believe that, why would you want to spend your study hour thinking about a three thousand year old Jewish King who thought that good people eat to their heart's content while the stomach of the wicked goes hungry? (Which is not, incidentally, true.) Why would you particularly care who rebelled against King David and what he did about it? Why, if it comes to it, would you need to listen to Paul going on and on about the miscellaneous shortcomings of the churches in Corinth and Rome and wherever it is that Colossians come from?
I think that the dividing line between evangelical -- or, if you prefer, born-again -- Christians and liberal or modernist Christians is very probably this verse. Do you see Jesus as a saviour, or is he a teacher, an example, and an all around good chap. Some hyper-modernist clergy -- the kind who write columns in the Guardian -- seem to think that "God so loved the world" was foisted on this quite admirable Jewish rabbi by nasty Roman Emperors and even nastier American radio hosts. My whole infatuation with Aslan, C.S Lewis and Jesus (in, I am very much afraid, that order) came about because the idea of a God who loved the world so much in such a way that he gave his only son is a central, mystical, intuitive, self-contradictory lens through which everything else seems to make sense. If you take away the nasty-Constantinian-death-cult aspect, you are not left with a liberal, reformed version of Christianity: you are left with a void. In a funny way, I am more inclined to defend the Bishop of Woolworths (as C.S Lewis called the author of Honest to God) than I am the modern historical-Jesus-hyper-liberals. He at least appeared to recognise that if you took out God So Loved The World out of Christianity, there wasn't really very much left. And he did see that as a problem. Reducing the Bible to one verse is a childish, simplistic, cliche. But in another way, it is blatantly obviously right. If that verse isn't the heart of the Bible, then what is?
And that's why I don't feel I can write about John: not in the way that I wrote about Mark.
John is altogether too religious. When I hear the first chapter of Mark, I see a desert, and water, and a man in a rough loincloth, and another man walking through the desert to meet him. (There may, for all I know, also have been sand-worms and jawas.) When I hear the first chapter of John, I smell candle wax. I hear a piping choir boy singing Once In Royal David's City and a booming clergyman saying John Expoundeth The Mystery of the Incarnation.
When I think of John I think of big black Bibles. No, it's much worse than that. I am sorry to have to keep admitting this stuff, but what I really think of when I think of John is a glossy colour tract we used to give out in the Christian Union, called something like LIVING WATER FROM JOHN, with a little number before every verse, and photos of sunsets and doves and lambs on every page, to be given to the un-evangelised because it contained everything they needed to know to be Saved. (I think they had to be predestined to be saved first, but my theology on that point has always been rather shaky.) We also gave out one called LIVING WATER FROM ROMANS which must have baffled them even more.
When I began writing about Saint Mark, I tried to imagine a context. I pictured a man in a toga surrounded by eager children in sandals. "Well, since you ask me about Jesus of Nazareth, let me tell you what Peter told me..." As I read a bit more, that mental image changed. The idea that Mark's Gospel is literally the Memoirs of Peter -- or at any rate an unmediated account of a first century Galilean tradition -- is hopelessly romantic. Clearly what I was reading was stories; stories which follow an identifiable pattern. The technical word for that is Form Criticism. A lot of scholars think that the stories of Jesus circulated as oral tales before they were collected into gospels. They think that by studying the structures of these stories, and comparing them with what we know about other oral traditions, it is possible to make educated guesses about who first told them, and to whom, and why. I don't know anything about that. But it became much more useful to picture "Mark" going into taverns and market places and saying "Hey -- I've got a new Jesus story -- want to hear it?" than as a Homeric figure narrating a sacred saga from beginning to end.
How on earth am I to imagine John? A starry eye prophet, I suppose, on a rock, or by the beach, staring into the middle distance, chanting? The disciple who Jesus particularly loved; the one who the first Christians literally thought was going to live forever. Maybe the same fella who witnessed the end of the universe on Patmos.
None of that really helps. One can only picture John as "the person who wrote the book of John". It is pure text without context. It is the book which is most easily thought of as "inspired scripture" in the naive sense. A book written by God, with some first century human as the conduit. I don't think that Muslims see Mohammed's personality going into the Koran: he is the favoured human who Allah chose to transmit it through.
None of that really helps. One can only picture John as "the person who wrote the book of John". It is pure text without context. It is the book which is most easily thought of as "inspired scripture" in the naive sense. A book written by God, with some first century human as the conduit. I don't think that Muslims see Mohammed's personality going into the Koran: he is the favoured human who Allah chose to transmit it through.
Mark begins with a man eating sticky insects with a bit of cloth to cover his modesty. John begins with cosmic light and platonic paradoxes. His first word is an allusion to the first word in the Bible. His second word is a piece of untranslatable jargon. Douglas Adams began the second volume of the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy thus: "The story so far: in the beginning the Universe was created...." One feels that John is doing the same thing. In the beginning was the word...
And there's the problem. Having pictured Mark as a story teller in a tavern or a market place I feel quite free to be frivolous. To pretend I think his Gospel is a bit like Star Wars. One can be frivolous, I hope, without being flippant; and one can be disrespectful without showing disrespect. At any rate one can disrespect the story without disrespecting the Story. But drawing an analogy between Saint John the Evangelist, Beloved Disciple; Lofty Eagle of the Apocalypse and a quite funny radio writer feels sacrilegious. Cheap. Even analysing John Three Sixteen with a solemn face on still feels like stabbing at the heart and essence of Christianity. Of the whole universe. L'amor che move I sole e 'lalre stelle. (I bet I got it right.)
There is an online film of David Suchet reading the whole of Mark's Gospel at St Pauls's Cathedral. (Suchet has actually done live readings of the whole Bible, poor chap.) The clergyman who introduces him says that Mark's gospel is the story of a "man who changed the world". And I think that that is what I expected before doing my walk through the text. Mark, the earliest Gospel, I thought, presented Jesus as a super-duper holy teacher-man; whereas John, the latest, re-invented him as a divine being. The holy preacher man who tells human beings about God becomes God working undercover in the body of a human being. The proclaimer, as a very wise man whose name currently escapes me said, becomes the proclaimed.
But this could hardly be wronger.
As a matter of fact, I do think that Mark was probably an Adoptionist. He thinks -- or writes as if he thinks -- that Jesus had an ordinary birth and an ordinary human life but that he became God after he was baptised by John (the baptist). And he thinks -- or writes as if he thinks -- that Jesus was exalted to the highest point in the universe as a consequence of his crucifixion. And I do think that John (the gospel writer) believes -- or writes as if he believes -- in something much closer to what later became formalised as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Jesus had the quality of God-ish-ness before he was baptised; before he was born; before, indeed, the creation of the universe. In the BEGINNING was the word, and the WORD was with God and the Word WAS God. In the Authorised Version it rolls nicely off the tongue. The word BECAME flesh and camped out on earth, temporarily. Certainly, Jesus speaks to Nicodemus in the voice of an outsider. "No-one's ever been up to heaven except the the person who came down from heaven -- and who was that? This guy: who's still in heaven right now."
But it is entirely misleading to talk in terms of High Christologies and Low Christologies and much more misleading to say that what Mark is describing is simply a very influential man. In a sense, Mark's Jesus is God in a more straightforward sense than John's. Because what Mark gives us is mythology. The sky rips open. God flaps down to earth in the form of a pigeon and perches on Jesus. The founders of Judaism come down from heaven and chat with him. God joins them on the mountaintop. The guy from the obscure village has God inside him. To all intents and purposes, he is God. And we go forward on that assumption. God is sleeping in the fisherman's spare room; God is giving orders to Satan; God is telling the weather to stop being naughty. Everyone in the town, the country and eventually the world is magnetically drawn to wherever God happens to be at that moment.
What if God were one us us? What would he be like? (A stroppy, pedantic rabbi.) Who would his friends be? (Sinners. Collaborators. Fishermen.) Who would he not get on with? (Religious people. Obviously.) What would happen if he went to the place where God is supposed to live? (He'd start smashing it up. Obviously.) What would happen in the end? (The Jews and the Pagans would have a temporary truce and do away with him.) Would that be the end...?
John seems to be struggling to fit all that into a philosophical formula. How can we describe a God-Bloke without it sounding like nonsense? How can we talk about it without resorting to holes in the sky and magic birds? Well... God's teaching was always there. And God's teaching is God. So what if God's teaching turned into a person and stayed on earth for bit?
What if God were one of us? Well, he'd been a mysterious, other-worldly sage, who spoke elliptically about the great truth that God has become one of us...
I am confused and exasperated and puzzled by Mark's Jesus. I think that is because Mark intends him to be confusing and exasperating and puzzling. I think Mark intends you to wrestle with his Jesus: to chew on the parables and think "What did he mean by that?" Wrestling with God is a good thing to do. (I have Kirby's drawing of Jacob and the Angel above my writing desk. The Angel looks like a Celestial, as you would expect.) You can't wrestle with John's Jesus. You can't argue with him, and it would would be the height of lèse-majesté to find him exasperating. Asking what he means is beside the point. The only thing you can do is sit at his feet.
Mark's parables engage our brain. John's mysticism washes over us. Mark gives us teaching. John sometimes feels like spiritual mood-music.
At times, I almost want to abandon the idea that John's Jesus is a person.
We are told that when John says "in the beginning was the logos" he is talking about some difficult, neo-Platonic concept. (The neo-Platonists had mostly read John.) Well, maybe. But so far as I can see, the New Testament mostly uses logos in a straightforward, non philosophical sense. It can mean report ("this logos was widely circulated among the Jews to this day.") It can mean statement ("let your logos be yes, yes, or no, no.) It can mean language or speech. ("Don't use harmful logos, but helpful logos.") It can mean news or tidings ("the logos about them reached the ears of the Church in Jerusalem.") The one thing it practically never means is "word" in a grammatical sense. But most often it means preaching or teaching: the Word of God. The sower in Mark's parable sows the logos; when the disciples gather around Jesus in Peter's house, he speaks the logos to them.
So "the Word became flesh" needs to be taken at some level at face value. God's teaching wrapped itself in a human form.
Luke begins his story of Jesus' ministry by saying that in such-and-such a year "the Word of God came to John [the baptist] in the Wilderness." Can we entertain the possibility that John is using a literary device -- allegory, personification -- to show us that occurrence?
Perhaps when John talks about The Light he means enlightenment and goodness. Perhaps when he says that people hate the Light and run away from the Light he means that people prefer ignorance to knowledge and wickedness to virtue. But he personifies that as the rejection of a character called Jesus. He describes the Judeans turning against Jesus; but he means that religious people reject virtue and truth. He shows Nicodemus failing to understand Jesus: that's to show that the Pharisees don't understand the word of God. Perhaps he is not presenting a person who, in a metaphysical sense is the incarnation of the divine teaching: perhaps he is pretending that the divine teaching is a person for literary and didactic effect. Perhaps, in fact, he is doing the same kind of thing that Solomon did when he imagined Wisdom as a person in the market place. No-one supposes that Solomon was going to point to some actual lady at the vegetable stall and say "Look, there's that Wisdom person I was talking about -- follow her!"
I don't think this reading, Jesus-as-symbol works. Not consistently, in any case. In a disconcerting way there are passages where John is much more naturalistic than Mark. But it conveys something of my difficulty. Mark's Jesus is a person. John's Jesus is an idea. Mark says "This is what God would be like if he were a man". John says "This is what God is like."
Perhaps he was influenced by those gnaughty gnostics, who resolved the difficulty of God walking around in the body of a carpenter by dropping the "in the body" part altogether. Their Jesus is a force-ghost whose feet never touch the ground; a symbol of the secret knowledge but not in any sense a guy. But John goes to some lengths to make it clear that that's not what he believes.
Mark's Jesus is more dangerous than John's. More shocking. John's Jesus is very much what we would expect the Son of God to be like. Mark's decidedly isn't.
Mark's Jesus fits into my headspace. Granted a flat earth with heaven upstairs and hell downstairs and the sky in the middle, I know what it means to say that God crashed through a hole in the sky and came down to earth in the form of a Holy Dove. I don't know what it means to say that God was God's teaching and God's teaching was God and that God's teaching was turned into meat and set up a tent on earth. I can affirm it, but I can't imagine it. Except in some banal way: "Jesus lived such a jolly good life and he was such a jolly good example of all the things that God approves of that Jesus' life itself is better than any number of sermons." And that clearly isn't what John is saying. It would be a very circuitous rout to get to "Jesus is a very good example of how to live." And in any case, he isn't. Not particularly. John's Jesus doesn't do works of charity in the conventional sense. Mostly he talks about himself. The Logos incarnates to tell us the glad tidings that the Logos has incarnated.
We don't believe in three tier universes and sky-domes any more. Not even in Texas. But we can imagine them. John's version we can't imagine. We just have to piously attend to it. God was the Word. The Word was God. The Word became flesh. Perhaps, if we just say John Three Sixteen, John Three Sixteen over and over again the phos and the logos and the gnosis will kind of seep into us. Perhaps that's what being born of water and air means. Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare.
I am not trying to set Mark up above John. I am not trying to say that we should read Mark instead of John. I am not saying that Mark has it right and John has it wrong. I am not saying that Mark has, as the scholars say, priority. The aforementioned Bishop of Woolworths thought John was the more historical of the two. I am saying that Mark is telling a story. And I know how to talk about stories. And what John seems offer is an exposition of Mark's story. And when you have expounded it, it ceases to be a story. If I try to talk about John I am at worst expounding an exposition; and at best, setting my exposition up against the one the Church canonised. Which feels rude. And that pushes me into a style of writing that I don't feel comfortable with. I am just not sure that I can do it. I am not sure that I ought to.