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The Message of John’s Gospel
The Gospel of John tells the story of a counterculture Messiah who embodies the subversive wisdom of God and, through his death and resurrection, drives out “the ruler of this world.” The culture that he counters is not so much the culture of the people as it is the culture of the rulers, a culture that the rulers impose upon the people. “The ruler of this world” whom he drives out is the spirit of domination and empire, the spirit that inhabits all oppressive systems. The victory of this Messiah is both final, completed in his crucifixion and resurrection, and continues to be realized by all who follow after and believe in him; they continue, through the way of the cross, the battle to “drive out the ruler of this world.”
What!?
The above description of the Gospel of John does not reflect the prevailing interpretation, either among scholars or lay readers, of this gospel. The Bible, in general, in modern times tends to be interpreted apolitically. This mode of interpretation holds even more firmly in New Testament interpretation and, among the four canonical gospels, finds its apex in the Gospel of John, often called “the spiritual gospel.” The prevailing apolitical interpretations of the Gospel of John and the rest of the Bible, however, arise out of the virtually complete dichotomy between faith/spirituality/religion and sociopolitical realities that holds sway in modern Western culture, a dichotomy not shared by the ancient cultures that produced the Bible. The ancient world knew no separation between temple and state, much less between faith and politics.
However beneficial the separation between church and state may be in modern Western societies, the further separation of faith and politics (a separation that our culture can never completely sustain, as demonstrated especially by U.S. presidential elections) has crippled our culture’s ability to understand its most widely read religious text as well as its ability to read the deeper spiritual subtext of its own political narrative. One of the few interpreters of the Gospel of John who has explored its political dimensions, Wes Howard-Brook, comes to the following conclusion:
What the narrator of the fourth gospel makes crystal clear is that religion and politics are, in the end, the same thing. Both claim the availability of ultimate power to shape people’s lives. The only question for either is whether the power is claimed of life or of death, of God or of Satan.1
Whether or not one is ready to accept the idea that, even in today’s world, political matters are ultimately religious/spiritual and that religious/spiritual matters are ultimately political, this worldview does hold true for the authors and original audiences of the Bible. The Gospel of John tells a story that is both religious/spiritual and sociopolitical. Like the rest of the Bible, the text does not distinguish between the political and religious dimensions of life.
With this insight, this book will attempt to trace the contours of John’s political message, the good news of the subversive wisdom of the way of the cross.
Jesus is God!
For some pious, modern readers of the Gospel of John, its emphasis on the divinity of Jesus, what has been called its “high Christology,” comprises a major, if not the major, teaching of this gospel, and not without reason. The text begins by declaring, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God . . . and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Later, in 8:58, Jesus declares his identity using the name that God uses to self-identify in Exodus 3:14: “. . . before Abraham was, I am!” Jesus uses “I am” statements 19 other times in the story to speak of himself: 4:26, 6:35, 6:41, 6:48, 6:51, 8:12, 8:23, 8:24, 8:28, 9:5, 10:11, 10:30, 10:36, 10:38, 11:25, 13:19, 14:6, 15:1, 18:5, and 18:8. One additional statement would be an “I am” statement except that the verb is plural: Jesus announces in 10:30, “I and the Father are one,” combining the force of an “I am” statement with a clear declaration of his unity with the Father. Jesus follows up this declaration in 14:9 with the explanation, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” The divinity of Jesus, then, certainly comprises a major theme in the book. The question remains, however, whether this theme constitutes an end in itself or serves a more specific purpose for the original readers of the book.
John’s Purpose
Consideration of the original context in which the Gospel of John was written, along with a literary unpacking of its themes, reveals that this gospel aims to do more than make mere theological statements. The Gospel of John speaks to a context in which the temptation to accommodate to the ways of the world runs high, and this gospel attempts to convince its readers/hearers to persevere in the way of the cross, a way, or wisdom, that runs counter to the ways of the world.
The Gospel of John addresses a primarily Judean2 audience living in Ephesus in the late first to the early second centuries CE. Beyond that consensus, the makeup of the audience is much debated among scholars, but the possibilities allow for a range of people who can be placed along a spectrum of relationship to the community of Jesus-followers that produced this gospel, from committed followers of Jesus to people who are only considering becoming disciples to enemies of the community. The text itself provides clues as to the possible makeup of this audience: In the story, Jesus engages people who have committed to following him but nonetheless need comfort and reassurance as well as challenge (chapters 13–17), people who began following but whose commitment proves inadequate as Jesus’ message becomes clearer (6:66, 8:31–59), people who continue to seek after Jesus but are afraid to make a public commitment (Nicodemus, 3:1–9, 7:50–1, 19:39; Joseph of Arimathea, 19:38), as well as outright enemies who “persecute” him (5:16), fear the empire more than God (11:47–53, 19:15) expel from the synagogue those who follow him (9:22, 12:42, 16:2), and repeatedly attempt to arrest and/or kill him (5:18, 7:30, 32, 44, 8:59, 10:39, 18:1–14). These characters may reflect the various sorts of people that this gospel sought to engage at the time of its writing (as well as the types of people whom Jesus actually did engage).
The two groups that the Gospel of John seems to seek to engage the most are the committed faithful, as evidenced by the length of space given over to addressing them (chapters 13–17), and those on the fence, especially the ones hesitant to make a public commitment, as evidenced by the dialogue with Nicodemus in chapter 3 and the continued depiction of Nicodemus, and later Joseph of Arimathea, as “secret disciples.” In addressing these two groups plus any others, the way the gospel describes Jesus becomes an integral part of the argument. Jesus has to be able to defeat the powers and authorities of this world in a way that appeals to Torah-believing Judeans, some of whom may be tempted to give up resistance. The “high Christology” of the narrative serves that purpose.
In the aftermath of the destruction of the temple, and virtually of Israel, by Rome, Judeans turned to the Torah for life and salvation. The Gospel of John presents Jesus as an even greater Torah, the Word and Wisdom of God, existing prior to the written Torah. In John, this eternal Word becomes a subversive Wisdom, a subversive Torah, which brings down the empire and “drives out the ruler of this world.”
The propaganda of the Roman Empire proclaimed the emperor to be divine, “son of God,” “savior of the world,” one who “wipes away our sins,” and “shepherd of the people.” The Gospel of John (and the rest of the New Testament) claims these titles for Jesus, displacing the emperor from his throne. In doing so, the narrative of John not only usurps these titles for Jesus but claims even more for Jesus than the imperial propaganda claimed for the emperor. John proclaims that Jesus is the “only” son of God (1:14, 18; 3:16, 18) and, in fact, is God, not just one of many gods. The Roman senate declared certain emperors to ascend to the gods after death, but the Gospel of John declares that only Jesus has ascended (3:13). In making these claims for Jesus, the Gospel of John and the rest of the New Testament proclaim that God is found at the bottom of the empire/world, not at the top, that salvation and liberation come from below, not from above (although, as we will see, John reverses the world order via a “heavenly” perspective, emphasizing that Jesus is “from above”), from a Galilean peasant with no citizenship in the empire rather than from the emperor. In John, Jesus not only displaces the emperor and turns the world upside down, his salvation proves greater and more substantial than that of the empire; he provides the truly “abundant life” (10:10).
Seeing the Unseen
The evidence of Jesus’ victory over the powers and authorities of this world, however, proves exceedingly difficult to see for the original readers of this text. They live in a context where the empire seems to remain dominant and victorious over all of its enemies, including the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. This gospel must somehow convince its readers of what they cannot see. It must convince them that the way of the cross is the way to life, that prophetic witness and martyrdom will in the end defeat the kingdoms of this world that conquer and maintain their rule by the sword. It must convince them that the dominant propaganda, the imperial culture around them, is a lie and that the counterculture way of Jesus is the truth—in other words, that Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” (14:6).
The way of the cross in John (and the rest of the New Testament) finds its highest expression in martyrdom, but does not always include martyrdom for every person. The way of the cross more generally is the way of life that runs counter to the ways of the world, to the culture of empire and domination. According to John, the ab...