John Overview
Purpose
statement of his purpose: ‘Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (20:30–31). The words rendered ‘that you may believe’ hide a textual variant: either hina pisteuēte (present subjunctive) or hina pisteusēte (aorist subjunctive). Some have argued that the latter expression supports an evangelistic purpose: that you may come to faith, come to believe. The former, then, supports an edificatory purpose: that you may continue in faith, continue to believe. In fact, it can easily be shown that both expressions are used for both initial faith and continuing in faith (cf. Carson, ‘Purpose’, pp. 640–641), so that nothing can be resolved by the appeal to one textual variant or the other.
It is worth comparing these verses with the stated purpose of 1 John: ‘I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life’ (1 Jn. 5:13). This verse was clearly written to encourage Christians; by the contrasting form of its expression, John 20:30–31 sounds evangelistic.
Summary statement
Those who respond to Jesus, whether Jews, Samaritans or ‘other sheep’ (10:16) to be added to Jesus’ fold, are blessed; those who ignore him or reject him do so out of unbelief, disobedience (3:36) and culpable blindness (9:39–41), not genes.
The PLOT - To convince us that the cross (as offencise as it seems to suggest God would die for us) is the true adn right way from the beginning!
Part of his goal, then, in writing an evangelistic book for Jews and proselytes, is to make the notion of a crucified Messiah coherent. The intrinsic offence of the cross he cannot remove. What he can do, what he feels he must do, is to show that the cross was there from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (Jesus is early announced as the Lamb of God, 1:29), and that the cross is at one and the same time nothing less than God’s own plan, the evidence of the people’s rejection of their Messiah, the means of returning Jesus to his Father’s presence, the heart of God’s inscrutable purposes to bring cleansing (Jn. 13) and life to his people, the dawning of the promised eschatological age, God’s astonishing plan to bring glory to himself by being glorified in his Messiah. And if this is John’s concern, it is not entirely surprising that he decided to say nothing about the transfiguration. His purpose was too finely honed to admit it.
This approach may be supported by reflecting on the Fourth Gospel’s ‘plot’. The ‘plot’ is not mere sequence of events. “The king died, and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.’ So the plot of John’s Gospel is very tight, and is tied, finally, to the ‘hour’, the purpose of God in the crucial redemptive event in all Christian witness, the death, resurrection and exaltation of Jesus Christ, and the urgency of true faith in the wake of that event. Nothing will deter John from pressing to that point—indeed, from pressing men and women to come to terms with that point.
Theological Emphasies
The Word
Small wonder, then, that John’s summarizing title for Jesus is the ‘Word’. It is a brilliant choice. In the beginning was the Word; in the beginning God expressed himself, if you will. And that Self-Expression, God’s own Word, identified with God yet distinguishable from him, has now become flesh, the culmination of the prophetic hope.
The Lamb of God
If Jesus is the Lamb of God, it is that he might take away the world’s sin (1:29, 36). The slavery from which he sets men and women free is slavery to sin (8:34ff). Despite the heavy emphasis on Jesus as the one who reveals his Father, salvation does not come (as in Gnosticism) by mere revelation. John’s work is a Gospel: all the movement of the plot is toward the cross and the resurrection. The cross is not merely a revelatory moment (contra Forestell): it is the death of the shepherd for his sheep, the sacrifice of one man for his nation, the life that is given for the world, the victory of the Lamb of God, the triumph of the obedient Son who in consequence of his obedience bequeaths his life, his peace, his joy, his Spirit.
For John’s development of the theme of salvation, and related notions of sin, atonement, life and knowledge of God, cf. notes on 1:4–5, 8–11, 16–17, 29–34; 2:12–17, 23–25; 3:1–2, 14–15, 16–21, 36; 4:10, 13–26, 44, 48, 53; 5:14, 22–23, 24, 39–40; 6:27, 33, 36, 51–58, 62–63; 7:17, 18; [8:1–11]; 8:15, 21–26, 31ff.; 9:5, 25, 38–41; 10:11–18; 11:49–52; 12:14–15, 44, 50; 13:5–10; 15:21–25; 17:1ff.; 18:15–18, 25–27; 19:11, 34–37; 20:23, 30–31.
(3) Few areas of John’s thought have been more widely disputed, and with more divergent results, than eschatology (cf. Carson, pp. 134–146). John’s development of this theme is tightly bound up with his distinctive use of ‘the hour’ (often rendered ‘time’ in NIV: e.g. 2:4; 7:6). All major New Testament corpora display the tension of trying simultaneously to express the wonderful truth that in the ministry, death, resurrection and exaltation of Jesus God’s promised ‘last days’ have already arrived, and to insist that the fulness of that hope is still to come. Different authors set out the tension in different ways. The kingdom of God has come, but we must wait for it to come. The Holy Spirit is given to us as the downpayment and guarantee of the new heaven and the new earth, of the promised new creation with its resurrection hope; but meanwhile we groan in our earthly bodies waiting for the redemption that will be ours some day. The same tension is found in John: the hour ‘is coming and has now come’ (4:23; 5:25). Jesus has bequeathed his peace, but in this world we will have trouble (16:33).
Above all, in the wake of Jesus’ exaltation and his gift of the Spirit, we can possess eternal life even now: that is a characteristic of John, who tilts his emphasis to the present enjoyment of eschatological blessings. But this is never at the expense of any future hope: the time is coming when those who are in the graves will come out to face the judgment of the One to whom all judgment has been entrusted by the Father (5:28–30). This is neither an aberration in John’s thought, nor a piece of unassimilated tradition clumsily added by an incompetent redactor. It is part of what makes it possible for Christians to think of themselves as living between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’, between D-day and V-day (to use Cullmann’s famous analogy). If John insists that Jesus even now makes himself present amongst his followers in the person of his Spirit (e.g. 14:23), he also insists Jesus himself is coming back to gather his own to the dwelling he has prepared for them (14:1–3).
For the Johannine distinctives on eschatology, cf. notes on 1:31–33; 2:4; 3:3, 5, 15–16; 4:23–24, 37–38; 5:21, 24–29; 6:14–15, 25; 8:15–16, 51; 11:23–26; 12:20–36; 13:1, 31–32, 36–37; 14:1–4, 11, 18–20, 22–23, 27; 16:6–7, 13; 16:19ff.; 17:1ff., 12, 24–26; 19:25–27, 34–35; 20:17; 21:20–23.
Teaching John
The Questions to ask of every passage - What does it teach me about Jesus?
We have already seen ample evidence that John distinguished between what the disciples grasped of Jesus during the days of his ministry, and what they understood only later. This means that the preacher must constantly reflect on what the Evangelist is telling him about Jesus, both what took place ‘back then’ and what Christians, aided by the Spirit, came to understand of that unparalleled revelation.
Although there are many passages in the Gospels that enable the preacher to make a direct application to the congregation or to contemporary society (e.g. the love command, Jn. 13:34–35), there are still more whose proper application awaits reflection on what the passage says about Jesus. By ‘what the passage says about Jesus’ I do not refer exclusively to Jesus’ person and words and deeds (though I do not mean less than that), but to all that can be known of Jesus and his place in the sweep of redemptive history. How does Jesus fit into the Bible’s ‘story’? Rightly done, preaching from the Gospels enables a congregation to put its Bible together, and then to find the Bible’s deepest and most transforming application emerging from this vision. To put the matter another way, John’s stated purpose in composing the Fourth Gospel is not that his readers might believe, but that his readers might believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus, and that in believing they might have life in his name. To hammer away at the urgency of belief without pausing to think through what it is John wants his readers to believe and whom it is he wants them to trust is to betray the Gospel of John. Preaching from the Gospels is above all an exercise in the exposition and application of Christology.