Blogging Towards Sunday, January 9, 2022
We’re diving into the Gospel of John as our guiding text for our Sunday gatherings from now through Easter. It’s one of the four stories of the good news of Jesus (Gospel means good news) which tells his life, actions, words and mission. It’s believed that John’s account is the last one written as his retelling of the story reflects considerable theological reflection and uses metaphors and poetic language. One example is the play with light and darkness throughout the story. John’s account also contains only seven miracles – or signs as they’re called. A symbolic number in Jewish tradition that represents the divine.
In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God is presented as speaking the creation into existence. John begins his gospel telling of Jesus with a deliberate parallel. The word [logos in John 1:1-5] that God speaks creatively in the beginning takes on human form and enters history in the person of Jesus. Jesus speaks the word ad it happens: forgiveness and judgment, healing and illumination, mercy and grace, joy and love, freedom and resurrection. Everything broken and fallen, sinful and diseased, calling into salvation by God’s spoken word.
For, somewhere along the line things went wrong (Genesis tells that story too) and are in desperate need of fixing. The fixing is all accomplished by speaking – God speaking salvation into being in the person of Jesus. Here Jesus not only speaks the word of God: he is the Word of God.
Keeping company with these words, we begin to realize that our words are more important than we ever supposed. Saving “I believe,” [John 11:25] for instance, marks the difference between life and death. Our words accrue dignity and gravity in conversations with Jesus. For Jesus doesn’t impose salvation as a solution: he narrates salvation into being through leisurely conversation, intimate personal relationships, compassions responses, passionate prayer, and – putting it all together – a sacrificial death. We don’t’ causally walk away from words like that.
The story of the creative conversation in the word and person of Jesus is structured around 7 signs – the word that John uses for miracle. They continue the word of God in Genesis during the seven days of Creation. It would be difficult to tell these stories without conveying some sense of wonder that we’re being let in on something extraordinary, a realization that these signs are evidence that God is still at work in creation and isn’t just its Maintenance Engineer.
And God is still at work in creation today. Still performing sings that point to him. Still revealing not only his glory but also his goodness – and, most particularly, his goodness toward us. God is still changing the water of our lives into wine (the first of the seven signs that we read today!)…and not just any wine, but the finest of wines. [Isaiah 25:6].
Questions for Reflection & Examen:
· What engaged you, enraged you, or surprised you in the text?
· What invitation do you hear the Spirit of God speaking to you – or to us, as a church – to act, speak, be or change through this word of scripture?
Taken in large part from Eugene Peterson’s introduction to the gospel of John in the Message Translation.
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