IN SOME WAYS John’s Gospel functions as both a gospel and a letter. As a gospel it tells the story of Jesus, of his role as revealer of God the Father and provider of redemption to all humanity. As a letter it encouraged first-century Christians in the life they had chosen (and it encourages us today), showing how life in Christ differed from Judaism and Gnosticism. It corrected some followers of John the Baptist who didn’t quite get who the Baptizer was in relation to Jesus. As Gary Burge shows in this fine commentary, the Gospel of John narrates the life of Jesus and teaches what that life meant to those who knew him or had heard about him.
This dual purpose lends itself particularly well to one of the principle emphases of the book of John—Christology. Christology is the doctrine that studies the person and work of Christ. Needless to say, “Christology” was not a “doctrine” in John’s day. Jesus had come among them. He had done signs that revealed God’s plan of redemption to them in public settings around Galilee and Jerusalem. He taught those who chose to follow him, and they were with him when he encountered resistance and was crucified. He was raised from the dead. Yet in spite of the miraculous signs, pointed teachings, and resurrection (the raw data out of which Christology was shaped), it took hundreds of years for the church to come to some agreement about Jesus’ incarnation—his humanity and divinity. The Gospel of John is in many ways the first reflection on his incarnated nature.
Little wonder, then, that the Gospel of John has been used to support the misplaced emphases that such a difficult teaching can fall prey to—and that it is still used to support mistaken impressions of who Jesus was. The present book is valuable today because in talking about who Jesus was, it resonates so clearly with spiritual needs common to our twenty-first century world.
For example, one of those needs is to be assured that Jesus was indeed the Son of God. Our faith rests on it. Although some suggest that we could better identify with a purely human Jesus, such a teaching would result in a much different religion—call it Jesusianity—that would do little to meet our needs for God. True, Christ’s divinity can be overemphasized if it ignores his humanity. Some early Christians did precisely that, saying that Christ was only divine and that his fleshly body was an illusion. That position (often called adoptionism), however, overlooks a second, balancing teaching in John regarding Christ’s humanity. We need a human Jesus with whom to identify. But such a Jesus can only help us if he also has the power of God as part of his make-up. Jesus Christ needs to be both human and divine.
Jesus’ power to help us comes through another teaching of the book, the power of the Holy Spirit. The author makes clear that Jesus was filled with Holy Spirit power and that when he left the earth, the power of that Holy Spirit remained with us, accessible to us all to enable us to reach out to God.
An adequate Christology needs all of these elements today: a human Christ to redeem us, a divine Christ to reveal God’s nature, and a powerful, Spirit-filled Christ to help us lead holy lives. The Gospel/letter of John provides all three—and it does so in a mysterious, literate way that beguiles and reveals as it pulls us deeper and deeper into the mystery of who God is.
Arguably the best-known passage in this book is the prologue, the first eighteen verses of John 1, where the author invites us to join in a poetic witness of intellectual praise to who Jesus was. The prologue tells us that Jesus was God, the logos or “Word [that] was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” But the Word was more than God: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
That’s a summation of Christology. It tells us who Jesus was. It is the distinctive teaching of our faith, and the world has never needed it more than now. The Gospel of John tells us the story.
Terry C. Muck