Manna Praxis

The Gospel of John: The Word Became Flesh

Introduction

Introduction — These Are Written So That You May Believe

Day 1 — The Gospel of John: The Word Became Flesh

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

If you have come to John from Job, you have come to the right book. Job cried out for a mediator who could lay one hand on God and the other on a man, and he trusted a Redeemer he could not yet see. What he was given, in the end, was an encounter out of the whirlwind, and that was enough for him, though it was not the last word. The deepest ache of that whole book is still hanging in the air when this one opens.

As you read, hold this: These are written so that you may believe.

John tells you why he wrote, near the end, in a sentence that governs the whole.

"Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name." John 20:30–31 (BSB)

He is not setting out to write a complete life of Jesus; he is making a case, and the verdict he longs for is belief that leads into life.

The book’s word

The first word we will sit with tomorrow is λόγος (logos), pronounced LOG-os. Strong’s G3056. John does not open with a birth or a genealogy. He opens before the world was made.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1 (BSB)

That sentence closes every door but one. He was with God, so He stands distinct from the Father; He was God, so He shares the Father’s own deity, whole and undiminished. A Greek ear, hearing this, would have caught the rational order standing behind the whole cosmos, while a Hebrew ear would have caught the word of the LORD by which God spoke the world into being. John takes up the highest word that both of those worlds possessed and then says what neither of them ever dared: this logos is a Person, and He became flesh.

"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14 (BSB)

The God who answered Job out of the storm has now answered in a Person, and the Mediator Job longed for has been given a name. Tomorrow we will stand at that hinge and look at it closely. For today it is enough simply to know the claim that the whole rest of the book will set out to defend.

What makes John different

Matthew, Mark, and Luke share so much between them that they are called the Synoptic Gospels, a word that means “seen together.” John stands apart from the other three, and most of what he records is his alone. He does not give us the parables or the exorcisms; he gives us conversations that run on for pages, Nicodemus coming by night, a Samaritan woman met at noon, the disciples gathered in an upper room. He frames the whole of the public ministry around two things.

Seven signs. John’s own word for them is sēmeia, signs rather than miracles, wonders that point past themselves to who Jesus is. He turns water into wine, heals an official’s son and a lame man at a pool, feeds five thousand, walks upon the sea, gives sight to a man born blind, and raises Lazarus from the grave. Each sign is a door, and the conversation that follows it walks the reader through.

Seven “I AM” sayings. He is the bread of life and the light of the world, the door and the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way and the truth and the life, and the true vine. Behind every one of them stands the name God gave Moses at the bush. So when Jesus says, “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58), the crowd stoops for stones, because they have heard the claim exactly.

A word about “the Jews” in this Gospel

Read this before the first day, because it governs all twenty-five of them. John writes hoi Ioudaioi, “the Jews,” fifty-seven times in twenty-one chapters. Matthew, Mark and Luke together use the phrase eleven times. The phrase does several different jobs in John’s hands. Sometimes it marks geography, Judeans as distinct from Galileans and Samaritans. Sometimes it means the temple authorities in Jerusalem, where the other three Gospels would say the chief priests and the scribes. Sometimes it means the festival crowds, who are divided about Jesus the whole way through. Sometimes it carries the nation and its worship, as when Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that salvation is from the Jews.

Everyone in this Gospel who loves Jesus is Jewish. John is a Jewish man writing about Israel’s Messiah. Mary is Jewish, and the Twelve, and Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and Nicodemus who carried spices to the grave, and the man born blind, and the crowd that wanted to crown Him king. Where John records opposition, he is recording an argument inside Israel about Israel’s own Messiah, and that argument is the one the prophets had been having for centuries.

Those fifty-seven verses have been lifted out of this Gospel and used to justify contempt, exclusion, expulsion and murder against Jewish people. The men who did it were reading a Jewish book against the Jews, and it was a wicked lie, and the church has a great deal to answer for. Manna Praxis will not add one syllable to it. Where John means the temple authorities, these studies say the temple authorities. Where he means a crowd in one place on one day, they say that. Where the text reports who happened to be standing in the room, that is all these studies report.

Carry one more thing through the whole book. The people who turn away from Jesus here turn away for reasons any reader might recognize in himself: they had positions worth protecting, they had settled convictions about what God would and would not do, and they weighed the opinion of the people around them more heavily than the evidence standing in front of them. A reader who closes John feeling armed against somebody else has read straight past it.

The shape of the book

John falls into two halves.

A few threads run the whole way through the book: the signs that keep pressing the reader for a verdict, the “I AM” that keeps sounding, the long contest of light against darkness, and belief, which John always keeps as a verb, for he never once uses the noun “faith.” To believe, in this Gospel, is something a person does: a coming to Jesus, and a clinging to Him once you have come.

"In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." John 1:4–5 (BSB)
"But to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God." John 1:12 (BSB)

The Gospel claims eyewitness authority. “The one who saw it has testified, and his testimony is true” (John 21:24). Christian tradition from the second century names the author as John the apostle, son of Zebedee, the disciple whom Jesus loved. We will read it as what it claims to be: the witness of one who leaned on His chest.

Most place the finished book around AD 85–95, likely written from Ephesus. By then the eyewitnesses were dying off and the church had come to speak Greek, and into that hour came a Gospel that recorded what Jesus did and then pressed past it to who Jesus is, which was exactly the word the moment needed.

The map

A map is only a map, and the sentence that governs the journey is still John 20:31. These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in His name. A reader can finish this Gospel holding a tidy set of seven signs, or an admiration for a great teacher kept at a comfortable distance, and still have walked past the one thing John wrote every line of it to get.

The verse the book stands on

The Prologue will say it tomorrow in the language of eternity, and the purpose statement says it in the language of a case brought before a court, but the two of them are making one and the same claim. The Word became flesh. John wrote every line of this book so that you would believe it, and in believing have life in His name.