Sampling The Gospel of John 1:19-3:36

In two previous articles, we have sampled some sections of the Gospel of Mark, the first Gospel to be written. In this and the following articles, we will take some blocks of the Gospel of John and read them as a whole.

1. Read this first before you proceed with the "Lectio."

1.1. The Purpose of the Gospel of John: The author of the gospel states the reason for his writing his book(s) as follows: "...these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name (Jn. 20:31)." For John then, it was a matter of life and death that one has to know Jesus and to believe in Him. "To believe" is not simply an intellectual act; it is rather the act by which I entrust myself to a Person. What John intends is that his reader should come to know Jesus and to entrust his/her life to him that "he may have life to the full." To do otherwise spells death. But "to believe in Jesus" implies a previous decision to be for Him. It is this previous decision which -- if it has not yet been made --the reading of the Gospel helps the reader to formulate; where it has been made, the reading of the Gospel enlivens it and challenges it.

1.2. Overview of the Selected Passage. We are skipping the Prologue of John (1:1-18) for pedagogical reasons. The Prologue is best understood once we have read the whole gospel. We begin instead with the section that follows it so that we can immediately begin our Encounter with the Lord. For the sake of convenience, we shall follow the division proposed proposed by Pheme Perkins in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary:[1]

1.3. The Voices of the Narrative. All of the Gospels are confessions of the early Christians' faith in Jesus in story form. John is but the writer of a Church which had a particular experience of the Risen Lord, an experience deepened by the recollection of His earthly life and their worship of Him. We can detect the voice of this community in 3:12-15, breaking into Jesus' response to Nicodemus. We can also discern in the narrative an interaction between the writer himself and his community on the one hand with their living memory of Jesus on the other, in 3:16-21 and 3:31-36 which explain the sections which precede them (3:11-15 and 3:27-28 respectively). But above all, we have the voice of the narrator who tells the story of Jesus to us who have come after him in time. This means that for us to Encounter Jesus, we must first accept the testimony of John and his community. Their faith is the norm by which we measure our own, and it is through their memory that the Risen One becomes present to us.

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