meant; that was the guidance of the Holy Spirit. John had thought about every word that Jesus had said; and he had thought under the guidance of the Holy Spirit who was so real to him. Professor W. M. Macgregor of Trinity College, Glasgow, had a sermon entitled: ‘What Jesus becomes to a man who has known him long.’ That is a perfect description of the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel. A. H . N. Green Armytage puts the point perfectly in his book John Who Saw. Mark, he says, suits the missionary with his clear-cut account of the facts of Jesus’ life; Matthew suits the teacher with his systematic account of the teaching of Jesus; Luke suits the parish minister or priest with his wide sympathy and his picture of Jesus as the friend of all; but John is the gospel of the contemplative.
He goes on to speak of the apparent contrast between Mark and John. ‘The two gospels are in a sense the same gospel. Only, where Mark saw things plainly, bluntly, literally, John saw them subtly, profoundly, spiritually. We might say that John lit Mark’s pages by the lantern of a lifetime’s meditation.’ In his Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth defined poetry as ‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity’. That is a perfect description of the Fourth Gospel. That is why John is unquestionably the greatest of all the gospels. Its aim is not to give us what Jesus said, like a newspaper report, but to give us what Jesus meant. In it, the risen Christ still speaks. John is not so much The Gospel according to St John; it is rather The Gospel according to the Holy Spirit. It was not John of Ephesus who wrote the Fourth Gospel; it was the Holy Spirit who wrote it through John.
The Writer of the Gospel
We have one question still to ask. We can be quite sure that the mind and the memory behind the Fourth Gospel is that of John the apostle; but we have also seen that behind it is a witness who was the writer, in the sense that he was the one who actually wrote it all down. Can we find out who he was? We know from what the early Church writers tell us that there were actually two Johns in Ephesus at the same time. There was John the apostle; but there was another John, who was known as John the elder.
Papias, who loved to collect all that he could find about the history of the New Testament and the story of Jesus, gives us some very interesting information. He was Bishop of Hierapolis, which is quite near Ephesus, and his dates are from about AD 70 to about AD 145. That is to say, he was actually a contemporary of John. He writes how he tried to find out ‘what Andrew said or what Peter said, or what was said by Philip, by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the disciples of the Lord; and what things Aristion and the elder John, the disciples of the Lord, say’. In Ephesus there was the apostle John and the elder John; and the elder John was so well-loved a figure that he was actually known as The Elder. He clearly had a unique place in the Church. Both Eusebius and Dionysius the Great tell us that even in their own days in Ephesus there were two famous tombs, the one of John the apostle and the other of John the elder.
Now let us turn to the two little letters, 2 John and 3 John. The letters come from the same hand as the gospel, and how do they begin? The Second Letter begins: ‘The elder to the elect lady and her children’ (2 John 1). The Third Letter begins: ‘The elder to the beloved Gaius’ (3 John 1). Here we have our solution. The one who actually penned the letters was John the elder; the mind and memory behind them was the aged John the apostle, the master whom John the elder always described as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.
The Precious Gospel
The more we know about the Fourth Gospel, the more precious it becomes. For seventy years, John had thought of Jesus. Day by day, the Holy Spirit had opened out to him the meaning of what Jesus said. So when John was near the century of life and his days were numbered, he and his friends sat down to remember. John the elder held the pen to write for his master, John the apostle; and the last of the apostles set down not only what he had heard Jesus say but also what he now knew Jesus had meant. He remembered how Jesus had said: ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’ (John 16:12–13). There were many things which seventy years ago he had not understood; there were many things which in these seventy years the Spirit of truth had revealed to him. These things John set down even as the eternal glory was dawning upon him. When we read this gospel, let us remember that we are reading the gospel which of all the gospels is most the work of the Holy Spirit, speaking to us of the things which Jesus meant, speaking through the mind and memory of John the apostle and by the pen of John the elder. Behind this gospel is the whole church at Ephesus, the whole company of the saints, the last of the apostles, the Holy Spirit and the risen Christ himself.
JOHN
THE WORD
John 1:1–18
When the world had its beginning, the Word was already there; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. This Word was in the beginning with God. He was the agent through whom all things were made; and there is not a single thing which exists in this world which came into being without him. In him was life and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not put it out. There emerged a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness, in order to bear witness to the light, that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; his function was to bear witness to the light. He was the real light, who, in his coming into the world, gives light to every man. He was in the world, and, although the world came into being through him, the world did not recognize him. It was into his own home that he came, and his own people did not welcome him. To all those who did receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God. These were born not of blood, nor of any human impulse, nor of any man’s will, but their birth was of God. So the Word of God became a person, and took up his abode in our being, full of grace and truth; and we looked with our own eyes upon his glory, glory like the glory which an only son receives from a father. John was his witness and his statement still sounds out: ‘This is he of whom I said to you, he who comes after me has been advanced before me, because he was before me.’ On his fullness we all of us have drawn, and from him we have received grace upon grace, for it was the law which was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the unique one, he who is God, he who is in the bosom of the Father, who has told us all about God.
WE shall go on to study this passage in short sections and in detail; but, before we do so, we must try to understand what John was seeking to say when he described Jesus as the Word.
THE WORD BECAME FLESH
THE first chapter of the Fourth Gospel is one of the greatest adventures of religious thought ever achieved.
It was not long before the Christian Church was confronted with a very basic problem. It had begun in Judaism. In the beginning, all its members had been Jews. By human descent Jesus was a Jew; and, to all intents and purposes, except for brief visits to the districts of Tyre and Sidon, and to the Decapolis, he was never outside Palestine. Christianity began among the Jews; and therefore inevitably it spoke in the Jewish language and used Jewish categories of thought.
But although it was cradled in Judaism it very soon went out into the wider world. Within thirty years of Jesus’ death it had travelled all over Asia Minor and Greece and had arrived in Rome. By AD 60 there must have been 100,000 Greeks in the Church for every Jew who was a Christian. Jewish ideas were completely strange to the Greeks. To take but one outstanding example, the Greeks had never heard of the Messiah. The very centre of Jewish expectation, the coming of the Messiah, was an idea that was quite alien to the Greeks. The very category in which the Jewish Christians conceived and presented Jesus meant nothing to them. Here then was the problem – how was Christianity to be presented to the Greek world?
William Lecky, the nineteenth-century historian, once said that the progress and spread of any idea depends not only on its strength and force but on the predisposition to receive it of the age to which that idea is presented. The task of the Christian Church was to create in the