“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 Aberdeen as a pastor, visited one of the oldest women in his congregation–and they both asked exactly the same question: ‘Is God really like Jesus?’ And he assured them both,…
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 verse 30, the Greek reads simply “en de nyx,” which translates as “And it was night.” This second half of John’s gospel takes place…
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 till winter solstice, and we prepare for Christmas as they prepared for Passover. For both them and us, the days are getting darker. Here John shows…
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 dwells. 2. In John 2, he cleanses the Temple and replaces it with his body. 3. In John 6, he says he is manna come down from heaven….
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, Hanukkah. The Judeans celebrated the liberation of their temple from foreign Greek forces and the establishment of the Maccabean kings. Jesus was walking in King…
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 for 38 years, we have a man born blind who is healed by Jesus. Instead of a man sitting by…
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 order to cast them at him.” (John 8:59) The stone-throwers are the same as at the beginning of the chapter, but instead of aiming at a woman, they…
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 man who is faced with an angry crowd and must tell them the truth they don’t want to hear. The first man is Nicodemus. He is in the…
The Jewish people celebrate three major festivals described in the Torah: Sukkot (Tabernacles) in the autumn, Pesach (Passover) in the spring, and Shavuot (Pentecost) in the summer. (Chanukah in the winter didn’t even make the top five in Jesus’s day.) The other three gospel writers, of course, tell us about Passover, and Luke in Acts…
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 us many things were only understood backward. The first understood-backward thing was back in Chapter 2: “Thus when he was raised from the dead his…
