Greetings, salutations and felicitations

These my are initial ruminations on John’s take on Jesus the Christ.

We completed and left the journal work on the Gospel of Mark at a point where no more could have been said regarding that gospel. The gospel was simple, striking and hard like stainless steel. Mark’s approach was the historical revelation of Jesus’ life, they were a progression from beginning to end. The writer portrayed His life as a sermon to all concerned, apostles, disciples and followers –and us the reader today.  The gospel was life like in the extreme. I say this because the words punched me every time I read them. They supported me in the throes of deep anguish as my Ruth was struggling with her life and meaning. Really there was not much I could do at the time I started my ‘journey’ with Mark, it drew me into its insides more and more. It was as I said in the earlier book, Eternity and Readiness….; the impelling and compelling at the beginning through to the end of the writing process.

Which brought me to think about what was next, if anything? The building of the journal into a book took a long time, from post to pre, to publishing; it was almost ten years of creation. And prior to that there were the decades of sorting out of my life and the eventual humanization that I am only slightly aware of now. There is a kind of movement to the gospels as well: Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. If Mark is the Alpha, then John is the Omega. If Mark is simple, then John is complex. If Mark is as close to historical as we can get, then John is metaphysical through and through. Just thinking about John makes me stand in awe. (A fuller explication of this word will follow.) Fear and fascination is correct too. In Mark I tried to show how Jesus related to the Kingdom of God. If you have not read my first book, I will bring it on home how Jesus presented this to us. I repeat, Jesus was flooded with the experience of the Kingdom of God. I hope by the end of this journal, we will be too.

This work about St John is a continuation of the work on St Mark. Themes are evident in both, thus the oral tradition for each was from a common experiential well. Where Mark begins with the baptism of Jesus, John starts his gospel with the famous lines we all know. It strike me that where Mark is factual, John is a credo, a faith communication in three lines at the beginning. Naturally, Mark actually starts with the prophet Isaiah, that can be thought of as a faith statement, yet nowhere near as powerful as “In the beginning…” is to us. Thus from eternity on, and that is a very long time ago in human years the process of the good news has been moving ‘forward’.

Another theme evident in both is the ‘idea’ of the Kingdom. I expressed in ‘Eternity and Readiness’ and explain more in this book, that the Kingdom is not a location. It an experience and a place in our hearts, better -souls. This will be well developed in John’s Gospel. It has its antecedents in Jewish theology just not as well developed, not because of some slowness of theological thought; rather Jesus’ overwhelming event broke through to a fuller communication of His relationship to the Mystery of Life.

John more than any of the other gospel writers, uses words that are both Gnostic and thus mystical. Just notice the first lines of his gospel. Read them and you are flat out in another dimension of knowing, doing and being. Each word has a depth, width, and weight not heretofore read in the other three. The development of thought about Jesus was well advanced by 100 ACE. The thinking had not only advanced but evolved such that John could talk in this fashion and not be thought of as wrong. Certainly by now there were more writers in the Christian Movement and by virtue of that fact there was more objectification of the story.

I have never read John cover to cover nor did I read Mark cover to cover prior to the last ten years. I mention this because both are fresh to me. Except for a few well known passages I knew very little of his style. I am struck by John. IT is striking because of his assumption that the reader knows or would know of what he was describing, scenes, stories, and so forth; he almost assumes that you are one of the ‘saints’ or followers of Jesus such that you the reader has had an event not unlike Jesus’ and have come to the gospel to validate your ‘self’. I’ll have more to say about this. Mark really did not make this assumption and thus his gospel lacks John’s eruditeness, or his effulgence. Mark, in my opinion, was not trying to manipulate the reader. While John’s gospel is clearly trying to have you know that Jesus was the Special Man.

John’s gospel is the final word about Jesus allowed into the Christian canon. The many other ‘gospels’ are not less good as much as rejected by the then Church fathers. Because it is the last word, it is a compacted eighteen chapters. I mean by this that it is full to the brim and fittingly called a “Spiritual Biography of Jesus.” As any biography is meant to bring together all the parts of a person’s life, John here attempts to do just this, a summation and it lauds Him. It is a limited life story, it sketches His adventures, with close ups, and anecdotes. Yet there is more, there is the mystery, depth and greatness of Jesus in the many encounters as He points to God and man interacting. As in any biography there are holes and attempts to fill those with viable versions of events. Remember that this is 100 years after the actual events of Jesus. It is four generations; many of the original participants were dead, or very old. The Romans had destroyed the Temple and already there were Christian persecutions, trials and deaths current with this final gospel. AND the Word was spreading.

During my writing of “Eternity and Readiness” I was unconsciously attempting to capture the truth of Jesus in everyday language. As I progressed to the end of that book, now upon reflection, I get that it can be done if you approach Jesus as a human being much like us, Jesus’ humanness. With no derogation of the Godliness that Jesus was wrapped in, or trying to anthropomorphize the Special Man, Jesus is intelligible only by getting Him as one of us. Again John really takes it to another level which I will deal with in the journal on the gospel of Jesus, the Willing Servant. John was ready to wring out the truth of Jesus and after his final period, there was no more to say, in terms of ‘legitimate’ gospels. John’s writing was hierophantic. He wanted Jesus known, seen and experienced as a God among men, thus, it became the last gospel. Word by word, his interpretation magnified earlier gospels’ positions and propositions in order to punctuate Jesus’ message concerning the Kingdom of God. Still I maintain that Jesus can only be understood in the context of a human experiencing the Transcendent. God’s action in the life of Jesus and His readiness for eternity is central to this gospel as well as Mark.

Can I briefly review the central themes of my previous book? Or you can read it yourself and come to your own conclusions. First, to get Jesus you have to get God and if you do, Jesus is a bit easier to interpret for everyday living. Second, Jesus had a deep event that pointed Him to the Transcendent; it is trite to say it this way, I’m sorry, yet it points the direction where we will come upon the meaning of life, the universe, and all our terrestrial neighbors, animate and inanimate. Third, the gospels are Jesus’ sermonizing about this for the times and forever. Fourth, He suggested that we too can following the exact path-way to the Kingdom of God, with the exact same skills, strengths and results. Fifth, God is an experience. Sixth, read The Gospel of Mark Eternity and Readiness  A Layman’s Journal for lesser conclusions, please.

So let me start off with The Gospel John -The Spiritual Biography of Jesus, The Willing Victim.

It is amazing that there are four gospels when you consider that in Buddhism there are…it would seem that the keeping of these four shows a bit of uncertainty about their ‘authenticity’.

John as the bearer of Jesus’ mentality.

John was a mystic to have written the opening lines of his gospel. But more importantly, from where could the opening line have come? You know them well…”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God.” Fifteen words of the highest importance. Yet did they emerge from John’s mind, awareness or consciousness fresh or was it patterned after some earlier thoughts? Was it merely an evocation or a creation from the salt of the times? Was it a rephrasing of extant ‘scriptures’? -Will we ever know? Still these fifteen words are a credo for the entire gospel following.

Yet, Genesis starts akin to these fifteen words. John echoes Moses’ Genesis which is the story of Eternity in creation mode. What happens there? First there is light separated from darkness. There was an absence of cosmos. Not in the sense of universe, rather in the sense of structure. (Online Etymology Dictionary). There was a formless-ness. What brings it about? Certainly language is one part of the formation of ‘what’s out there.’ The ‘word’ names the cosmos to attention, to become aware of, to be-ing, and it can be seen in the action of Eternity. “In,” the first word shows something inside, internal, or within. If you notice that the other words for ‘beginning’ could be eternity or God, reading perhaps this way…’Inside of God was the plan for the cosmos.’ Still, this is not totally true. Word has a force with it just like Moses’ Genesis wanting expression and rendered in the creation story. Where the creation story is God in action, in the gospel it seems that the Word is in action of creation, and that Word is God. This is a bit different than Genesis. Bluntly, God has a baby and named it Jesus or God’s incarnation now. This is why I suggest John has a different approach than Mark, if you have read my first book Eternity and Readiness.

“In the beginning was the Word” another way to look at this is that the Word is Eternal…timeless, formless, undying, a unity, the burning bush that does not consume itself,

Words associated with logos: mystery, structure, meaning, story, logic, word, thought, organizing principle,

In the beginning…once upon a time. Every story has a beginning. In Mark it is pointing to Isaiah not as the genealogical or family tree beginning rather it is the theological start of the story. Isaiah among others ‘gave birth’ to Jesus. Abraham, Isaac, Israel, Moses, and many more prophets and leaders laid the track that Jesus could ride in on. Jesus is and was the first of many brothers. Beginnings also drive a stake into the ground that marks a before and after, an ending of something and now a beginning of something, yet with Jesus it is something very new.

…Disassembled these three phrases suggest three different points of view: eternity, totality, and ‘momentality’, meaning this moment.

John suggests a Gnostic view well…

Mark and John open with John the Baptist. St John uses the Baptist’s presence as a pointer to Jesus, the light. John calls Jesus many terms or appellations…No baptism by John of Jesus. It shows Jesus baptizing as well. If John was baptizing, was his baptism and ‘complete’ as Jesus’? In other words, if he was a pointer to Jesus, why did he continue to baptize after Jesus revealed Himself to him?

…Jesus selects the twelve apostles many who called him the Messiah, the Christ(Greek).

More to come. Tell me what you think.