In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Context : Both Pagan and Jewish narratives of ultimate beginnings or underpinnings.
Jewish : In the beginning .... recaps Genesis 1. The Word of the Lord and all that suggests of God's words to Israel. Including the Torah and living Wisdom of Proverbs 8.
Greek : the Logos : the underlying principle of rationality ...
So right up, we have a crafting that is doing more to cross boundaries and merge narratives than the other (synoptic) gospels.
So ..
John has been in Ephesus - a major Greek city in the Roman Empire, for decades. Ephesus is a port - a place of exchange, and the cultural centre of the Empire. And so his Gospel is particularly interpretive - he, beloved disciple, is particularly entrusted with this long range mission of translating the words and life of Jesus, out into more culturally pluralistic but religiously diverse / ignorant context - a place where one can't take the Jewish narrative and background for granted.
So, for example, John barely mentions the Kngdom, which is so key to other gospels, but there is an an emphasis on life, life of the ages, eternal life - life has a central role, perhaps an easier entry to get, rather than Kingdom.
Do we catch that promise of longevity in John 21 - the late wine of interpretive reflection - where Jesus hints to two of closest disciples, how they will die? So John knows he was not promised to not die -just that he has lived on - was not on the same path as Peter - and that was implied in those first heady conversations - that morning on the beach - shivering with cold and amazement as they are invited to a eat around the new fire with the one they had thought was lost, who still gently, powerfully, leads them on - into strange, half understood yet strangely reassuring territory - just as He always had; talking of death and faith and life round the fire - the shimmering heat warped air less a distortion of this wonder than their own faltering grasp and amazement. Their grief giving way to new belief and joy, a new morning beyond all they had seen.
And so his Gospel - beyond the records of narrative and aphoristic sayings, beyond a more straightforward appeal to the Jewish expectation of Messiah and Kingdom, and into the culture they are in, John reflects deeply on the themes and images of the culture - employs more extended dialogues with individuals, teasing out their knowledge, clear symbols over deep undercurrents.
(Straightforward that is, to those who had known that heritage - we have to work harder now to recapture what that meant to them - and we need to or we miss much of the meaning - but John certainly knows all this, and is out wider in territory, like Paul on Mars Hill, not always leading with the Jewish scripture and history in that context).
So John invokes their interest in Logos - but soon revealed not as a static principle of philosophy, discerned by elite philosophers, but a Person who must be revealed and related to. Similarly Bacchus/Dionysus , their God of wine, will be in view in first sign, the wedding feast miracle of new wine. Both dimensions (Logos and this Bacchus like sign) strike Jewish notes as well - Logos as Word in Genesis, word of Torah and Wisdom of Proverbs, and wine as the Jewish expectation of an abundance of new wine signalling the Messianic age; the 6 stone jars of water for purification, hinting at the law not quite reaching that seventh day of rest, the law that never quite made it, fell short, now transformed into glorious wine - at a marriage feast no less, with all the symbolic overtones that has in scripture. Logic and Passion meet in this Jesus; and John has poetry that joins then, and also links the Jewish heritage with the wider context. Not, to be sure, that Bacchus and Jesus are joined, or that Logos links into gnosis of inner forms - but John will invoke their terms, before showing how Jesus exceeds all, as the Passionate Creator of all who has come among them. He just knows how to communicate to them in terms that will connect, will get attention.
So the Jewish heritage is not downplayed. But it is reworked in ways that the wider culture will get.
(Like Paul in that regard -who lived outside Jerusalem in another major cultural centre of learning, Tarsus. One suspects God has plans for his best communicators to be rubbing shoulders with the other philosophies and systems of the day - to practice their devout and passionate pursuit of Torah and now Jesus in full awareness of how those around live, of their way of life).
And so also Light and Dark are other themes that the pagan culture gets - and also have major role in John. Jesus is the true light.
So what themes, i hear a lecturer, who seeded some of this thinking, ask his class, what themes are key in our culture?
Sustainability, suggests one of his post grad students.
True enough. I know that its a major theme people would cite.
OK says the lecturer. Can we go with that? Are we too insecure in our grasp of the gospel? Do we always have to start with scripture? For all have sinned ... ? (or if we do that, maybe the creation groaning of Romans 8 (ie vs 14 ff), waiting for us to move into the redemptive dynamic of the Spirit, would be a useful start.
Relationships, it seems to me, listening remotely, later, are another theme.
And maybe, right there, with those themes, we have the universal and the particular.
I don't think we're the first to notice this - other philosophies are already evangelizing on these grounds, tapping into these approaches.
My son's school rang me the other day. A program is being run - called Jump Up. Something to do with developing self awareness through gardening, is what i hear. Would we like him to do it? I do a little homework.
the web site says:
- Enliven wonder and appreciation of the profound interconnectedness of all living things Respect, value and cultivate diversity
- Create an understanding of self within cultural traditions, global perspectives and history
- Recognise and nurture each individuals inherent capacity
- Value and enhance the three way relationships between families, schools and community
- Utilise local expertise and knowledge
Following a few more links I find that these 'Transformative workshops' are somehow linked to the Achuar people - Amazon tribe. And gradually the "environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling world" goals seem a little less like apple pie. The web trail lets you see that the indigenous wisdom that is cited, is tapping prophecies and dreams that come from the Amazon tribe - who were warned of the evil oil companies wreaking devastation - and apparently we are in a time when the Eagle and Condor must come together - and that some of the founding figures of this nice sounding group, are speaking at Shamanic workshops in the US. The images of kids with nice paper animal face cutouts suddenly take a different dimension when you know that - what are we invoking?
I feel a little of what an atheist might feel when Christians are taking the gospel into the state schools - i didn't sign up for this.
Now, i'm not too alarmed by this mix of goals and values - (my son had already opted out himself before we were really informed). And really, apart from that, I suspect the series of primary school workshops is probably too far downstream from the source to retain much of the original potency; i'm willing to grant that the school's program really might just aim to help people think differently about sustainability and relationships - is run by local people who tap into the idea that sustainability and indigenous cultures have things to teach our fragmented and disconnected culture; that we are too divorced from the natural world, that our consumerism has become selfish and our kids out of touch with their emotions etc. I've done some myself, without explicitly citing or promoting an overarching religious framework - no particular agenda to push at the time (though i think there is potential for churches to inhabit this as part of the Creator's redemption message, and years in science have cued me to the issue).
Not that i can fully endorse the flavour of this solution, but no need to go into battle against this diluted form of paganism, i think.
But the thing is - just as the film Avatar tapped these themes - the abuse of the wild planet, the love story at the centre - perhaps we should also be onto these themes - relationship, sustainability.
The tree of souls in that film, the idea of their deity being a network of all living forces, are clearly not what Christians believe. But we should feel the poetry before we reject it, if we are going to be able to connect, to communicate. As Chesterton says of pagan myths, we must feel them - find a corner of us delighting in the idea of the world standing on turtles - before we reject it - or we're not qualified to really comment.
"One life ends, another begins", Jake says, as his scientist brother who died violently, is cremated, at the start of the movie - and by the end, Jake has died in one world, but come to life again in another. It's not Christian, but we can feel the poetry.
"John", quotes the lecturer, who taught me back years ago "is a whispering forest of all traditional poetries. A lake where children can paddle safely and elephants swim." That is, both simple and deep.
Yet perhaps frustrates those who want everything nailed down - don't want to work with the poetry, who think that clear systematic theology is what you always find in Paul and is the prized model. Not that the gospel lacks propositional content. But it can be communicated in this other mode - and just as Genesis is a richer account of creation, in terms of what we ultimately need to know about the ultimate issue- than the science that follows out of that intelligible creation, so this way of communicating the Gospel might get closer to many, than beginning with fixed propositional statements. Just like Jesus interacting with Nicodemus and the woman at the well - who both try to fit Jesus into what they know, and find the conversation leading them out beyond that knowledge.
(Nor, for those who want the Cross in every sentence, or at least once a paragraph, lest we be going all soft and woolly, is the central redemptive theme lacking in John - though i hardly need make that case. We might find also Paul has certain dimensions - regarding the full scope of redemption echoing across creation - that have not been well heard).
To take another aspect of that film - the role of experience. The gradual development of Jake's vision and sensitivity to the new world, from being a well trained marine, a grunt with simple culture of discipline and force, to no longer belonging to that world, in ways that he could not communicate to his former military buddies. Repositioned as a child who sees nothing - he learns. Until he finds himself on the other side of the divide.
Experience changes us. Taste and see.
"Where do you live master? "
There is no definitive answer given, just an invitation to be with him.
“Come,” he replied, “and you will see.” (John 1:39)
"So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him"
We don't know what was said - some precursor of that rich teaching on Emmaus road - but is enough to change:
"The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah”
Experience changes. The world wants relationships. Is tapping pagan workshops on sustainability and the interconnectedness of living things. Its movies do the same thing. Can we go there .. .connect with the themes?
I knew a vineyard church in the US that picked up on environmental concerns - not full of radical green agenda, not abdicating its reformation stance, not even anti science or business, but because we do have something do say on creation, and can situate it in relationship with the true Creator. Like John telling his origin stories in ways that speak to scripture and culture. Can't we?
Avatar casts indigenous wisdom against corporate greed and militaristic linearity (though the film takes a sympathetic view of true science- even while the mishandled fruits of science and technology are complicit). We don't have to agree. But we should be able to speak to that concern. What does knowing the Creator have to do with science and technology - how do we name the Babel aberration of technology gone wrong, spiritual idolatry, and yet preserve the original mandate to know and discover given in the garden?
Taking John's modus operandi - storied in ways that speak to scripture and culture. I'm not there yet. But perhaps the point is engaging in ways that can be heard. Jesus travelled the distance form heaven to earth. So rather than ask them to come to us, jump our cultural hurdles, perhaps we can meet with relevant themes and terms. And, to be true to Jesus and John, with signs and wonders ("even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father" - yet John even represents these as part of a culturally aware message - the signs always mean something). All easier said than done. But I think this is the wisdom of the gospel of John, representing Jesus faithfully but differently from the other 3 gospels, tuned to that cultural milieu even while redefining it. The Word, after all, is not defined in our terms - turns out to be leading us into another story and deeper revelation. How do we follow?
