John

What John is about

John opens not in Bethlehem but before anything at all: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Fourteen verses later that Word has become flesh and lived among us. The whole Gospel unpacks that sentence.

It covers much of the same ground as Matthew, Mark, and Luke by a noticeably different route. There are fewer miracles — seven, which John calls signs — and each is followed by a discourse explaining what it means: bread for five thousand, then I am the bread of life; a blind man healed, then I am the light of the world; Lazarus raised, then I am the resurrection and the life. There are no parables in the usual sense. Instead there are long conversations, and the best of them are one to one — Nicodemus at night, the Samaritan woman at a well at noon, Pilate in his headquarters, Peter on a beach after breakfast.

The seven I am sayings are the book’s spine, and the phrase is not casual: it reaches back to the name God gives Moses at the burning bush, and John’s first readers heard it.

A third of the Gospel covers the last night, including the foot-washing and the longest stretch of continuous teaching in the New Testament, ending in a prayer for the church’s unity. John states his purpose openly near the end: 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.

Where it sits in the story

John was written later than the other three and assumes some knowledge of the story they tell. It is the Gospel the early church leaned on most heavily in working out how to speak about who Christ is, and its language runs directly into the Nicene Creed.

How to read it

John is often recommended as the first book of the Bible for a new reader, and that recommendation is sound: the language is simple, and the questions are posed directly. But it is not shallow. The same chapters that a child can follow are the ones the church has been thinking about for two thousand years, and chapter 1, chapter 15, and chapter 17 in particular repay a lifetime of return.