Believing is Seeing

A Guide for Responding to John’s Gospel

Bruce McNab

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781498298056
  9781498298070
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498298063
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

"What are you looking for?" These are Jesus's first words in John's Gospel, and he asks us the same question when we decide to follow him. We read John's Gospel because it helps us get closer to Jesus. We're like the first disciples, who answer his question with their own, "Master, where can we find you?" Only near the end of John's story do we learn the answer: Jesus lives in the hearts of all who love him. Believing is Seeing guides readers to believe more deeply in Jesus of Nazareth as the human face of God, seen through the eyes of his beloved disciple. It beckons us to bring to his gospel our soul-searching questions. Do Jesus's words stake a claim on my life? Does John's gospel test me intellectually, spiritually, or morally? Does John's portrait of Jesus make me see him a new way, pray differently, even live differently? Believing in Jesus, the Son of God, shapes how we perceive our own identity, the world around us, the nature of truth, and our relationship with God. To believe is to see with love's eyes.

Chapter One

1:1–18.The Prologue: “In the beginning was the Word.”

Vv. 1–5. “In the beginning was the Word . . . In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

INTRODUCTION. The first eighteen verses of John are the prologue to the gospel. It provides readers an essential tool for identifying the deep significance and timeless meaning of the episodes from the life of Christ this gospel narrates—the truth about God and humankind disclosed in the words and works of Jesus of Nazareth, his Son. The prologue is a meditation on Genesis 1, probably added to the finished manuscript by an editor before the gospel begins to be copied and distributed.1

These initial verses function as a theological introduction or “overture to the narrative,” written from a post-Easter perspective.2 The prologue introduces themes that will reappear at various points later in the book. Among the melodies we will hear played again are these: the re-creative, life-giving power of the incarnate Word; the invincibility of the true light that God sent into the world to enlighten and enliven everyone; the ability of faithful, eyewitness testimony to bring others to believe in God’s Son, through whom alone can we come truly to know the Father; the inevitable rejection of the Son’s truth by those who are not really children of God, although they masquerade as such; the ultimate, perfect revelation of the glory of God in the person of his Son, who takes mortal flesh and chooses to abide with human beings; and, finally, the abundance of grace, truth, and blessing which is poured out for all who believe in the One whom the Father sent.

To shift the metaphor, we may think of the prologue as a poetic lens through which the gospel’s editor wants us to read the personal testimony of “the disciple Jesus loved.” The prologue takes the story of Jesus back before his conception and birth, which are described in Matthew and Luke, back beyond the dawn of history itself, and identifies Jesus as God’s “Word,” by whom and for whom all things came to be. The prologue tells us that Jesus is God’s Word incarnate as a human being, sent into the world so that those who receive him and believe in him might become children of God. Logos is the Greek term that our English-language Bibles translate as “Word.” Since ancient Greek philosophers utilized logos as a technical term,3 some commentators treat its appearance in the prologue to John as an example of how Greek philosophy came to influence early Christianity. In recent years, however, Jewish scholars have pointed out that John’s idea of the Logos more likely derives from pre-Christian Jewish reflection on the creation story in Genesis and Hebrew Wisdom literature rather than from Greek philosophy. They observe in pre-Christian Palestinian Judaism a tendency to treat the Word of God sometimes as a theological being, virtually “a second God,” not unlike the way Christians ultimately come to regard the three “persons” of the Trinity.4 The rabbis of Jesus’s time closely connected Torah with Wisdom and spoke of both as pre-existent. Many scholars comment that when the prologue refers to the Logos as being “with God” (vv. 1–2) and later as becoming “flesh” and dwelling (literally “pitching his tent”) among us, he is using the same Torah/Wisdom imagery.5

In the body of his gospel John makes theological use of a number of terms initially presented here in the prologue. Readers should notice how the following words are used:

(nouns) word, life, light, darkness, truth, glory, hour, and world;

(verbs) believe, bear witness (testify), know, abide (dwell), come, see, follow, and live.

However, as we read John it is important to keep in mind that the author is not striving for rigorous semantic precision. His vocabulary is frequently ambiguous, and sometimes he deliberately uses double entendre. Since sentences with multiple layers of meaning appear regularly in John, careful readers will remain alert for them.

As we begin to read John, we should take care to recognize the weight the author gives to the function of witnesses, and in particular to eyewitnesses. John writes, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (v. 18). Later, in his sermon to the crowd in the Capernaum synagogue, Jesus tells them, “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father” (6:45b–46). The Fourth Gospel portrays Jesus, the unique Son of God, as the only human being qualified to offer eyewitness testimony about God and it offers readers “the disciple Jesus loved” as the ideal eyewitness, the one whose testimony concerning Jesus is “true” (21:24b).6

[1:1–5] 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God; 3 all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

RESPONSE. Everyone and everything has a history—individuals, families, nations, cultures, species, planets, stars, even the universe. We’re naturally curious about beginnings, especially our own. When I was little, I’d sit on my mother’s lap and say, “Tell me about when I was a baby.” Then she would tell me stories, filtered through her memories and molded by her emotions. My mother’s stories were not clinical reports, certainly not what my teachers many years later would label “scientific history.” But they were true stories about her and about me—what I might call “the truth according to Mom.”

I grew up across the street from my father’s parents, which doesn’t happen often for children growing up in America these days. When I was in junior high, I’d sit on their front porch and listen to Pappy talk about things he remembered from long ago. He’d suffered a stroke and wasn’t able to work for as long in his garden as he once did, so he’d sit on the shady porch in the late afternoon, enjoying the occasional east Texas breezes, waiting for his only grandchild to wander over and sit with him. Pappy required little prompting to re-tell tales he once heard from his own grandfather along with his personal stories about growing up in rural Arkansas during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the grandson of an immigrant Scottish carpenter. It wasn’t until I was a few years older that I realized the parts about him fighting with Indians and wrestling alligators were probably just a bit of fancy meant to entertain a youngster. But oral history is full of that sort of thing. He could have been a Hebrew patriarch telling stories to a circle of wide-eyed boys around a campfire in the century after the conquest of Canaan. But, unlike his ancient predecessors, my grandfather did have documentary evidence to back up at least one of his claims: a dog-eared old Kodak photo of himself and another man holding between them a rope from which hung the carcasses of several alligators.

The stories we tell about our beginnings reveal something of how we think about ourselves, our place in the world, and our future. “In the beginning was the Word . . .”—How far back in time do we set “the beginning”? Which of a number of possible beginnings did the author of the prologue have in mind?

In the beginning was the Word.

At the beginning of God’s self-disclosure, God spoke to Abraham, “Leave your native land and your family home, and go to a place that I will show you” (paraphrase of Gen 12:1).

In the beginning was the Word.

At the beginning of Israel’s history as a people, God spoke to Jacob, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob. Israel shall be your name—‘the one who wrestles with God’” (paraphrase of Gen 32.28).

In the beginning was the Word.

At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, God spoke to him, “You are my Son, my Beloved. I delight in you” (paraphrase of Mark 1:11).

In the beginning was the Word.

At the beginning of the church’s mission to the world, the risen One spoke to his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes to you, and then you’ll be my witnesses—in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth” (paraphrase of Acts 1:8).

In the beginning was the Word.

At the beginning of my personal awareness of the reality of God, when I was a very little child, my mother read Bible stories to me. She told me, “These are...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: How shall we respond to what we read in John’s Gospel?
• Chapter One
• “The Book of Signs” Begins—A General Introduction to John 1:19–12:50
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• “The Book of Glory”—Begins.A General Introduction to John 13:1–20:30
• Chapter Thirteen
• The Farewell Discourse—A General Introduction to Chapters 14–16
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• John’s Passion Narrative—A General Introduction to Chapters 18–19
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• John’s Two Resurrection Narratives—A General Introduction to Chapters 20 and 21
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-one
• Appendix One—Who was “the Beloved Disciple”? When and for whom did he write?
• Appendix Two—Who are “the Jews” in John’s Gospel?
• Bibliography