Category: New Writing

“Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance tells about how, as a young army chaplain, he held the hand of a dying nineteen-year-old soldier, and then, back in Aberdee...

The word “light” has occurred 23 times in John so far. After Chapter 12, the word does not recur. With Chapter 13, we have come to the Passover feast, and in ve...

John gives us another timestamp: it is now six days before Passover, and everyone is preparing and planning for the impending feast day. For us, it’s now a week...

Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus upends things, both metaphorically and literally: 1. In John 1, Jesus takes the place of the tabernacle as the place God dw...

In the center of this chapter, John gives a date for the event, or more specifically, a festival from which we can date it: the Feast of Dedication, that is, Ha...

After the darkness of John 8, in John 9 we have a story that’s light in every sense of the word. John 9 is like a sequel to John 5. Instead of a man withered fo...

This chapter ends with a stark sentence, simple enough to be an example in my colleague Owen Ewald’s open-access Greek textbook: “So they took up stones, in ord...

There’s a chapter division between the two stories in today’s entry, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that these stories are very similar. Both focus on a ma...

The Jewish people celebrate three major festivals described in the Torah: Sukkot (Tabernacles) in the autumn, Pesach (Passover) in the spring, and Shavuot (Pent...

You may have heard a saying that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. The Gospel of John tells its story forward, but John tells ...