Pastor John: A Practical Interpretation of St. John’s Gospel

Introduction 1

What Language Shall I Borrow?

¹

May we study you and study ourselves, we pray.

This is a book with a practical pastoral approach based on a fresh study of St. John’s Gospel. St. John’s Gospel is like an art gallery. Each chapter is like a room that gives a new vision of an answer to the question, How does Jesus give himself to us? Each chapter is journeyed through from a narrative-critical and reader-response point of view, defined below. Of course, I try to honor all Johannine scholarship. The emphasis here is that part of the message of John is devoted to pastoral theology and to an answer to that key question. Side by side with this, and step by step through the Gospel, connections are made to the deep pastoral care of persons, and an understanding of human personality development. In particular, I shall be using a developed model deriving from Clinical Theology and the work of psychiatrist Dr. Frank Lake. Alignments with John are made in sequence, with particular insights based on a psychodynamic approach into the pain and distress that often grows in us. Models of understanding from pastoral counseling, psychotherapy, and literature are brought to bear as a spur to our own awareness and ministry to others. Bringing together text and therapeutic applications in this way puts us in touch with, and enables us to sense, how it is that Jesus Christ can enter and bring healing and peace, the abundant life that consists of abiding in him.

1. The Beginning

Many threads have woven the tapestry of this book over a long period of time. I was privileged to go on a Mid-Service Clergy Training Course at St. George’s, Windsor Castle, UK, in January 1974. My field of interest and experience was group work. I tried to write up a paper on it, especially on the value and effectiveness of group work that is pastorally informed, both in the core and on the edge of church life. The course arranged for small groups to meet for reflection. The tutor presence in the group I was in was Canon Stephen Verney (as he then was). He was sometimes not there, though never an absence, for he was always in our mind in that he was caring for his first wife, who was in hospital dying of cancer. I happened to be the leader on a day when he returned from hospital. We were put in touch with what we suffer when we and our loved ones are ill, and especially of what the ravages of terminal illness mean, and of how distressing many interventions are, both to patient and relative. We were put in touch with the extremity of human suffering and existential threat. We tried to listen and empathize and be not quite inadequate, to be a presence for him out of our own half/mid maturity of ministry.

Indebted to him for his courage, faithfulness, and sensitivity, for the way his ministry and personal journey had a shared integrity, and impressed by the openness of his approach to and passionate conviction about ministry, I suggested him as the person to take the meditations or sermons in the Holy Communion services of the annual Clinical Theology Association Conference in 1974 or 1975. He led four meditations on John, though that is too quiescent a word—four stimuli, stirrings, connectings, provocations (in the narrow sense), expositions—with passion: John 2:1–11; 4:4–26; 8:56—9:10; 15:1–17. The theme was the new consciousness that comes to us with Christ. Something of his own vitality cum pain made the great Johannine words our own—water, life, truth, worship, seeing, abiding, believing. He was representing the truth we were looking for. It was fresh. I was hooked on St. John. Here, text and human personality and faith could run together. These talks were a foundation for his later book in 1985, Water into Wine: An Introduction to John’s Gospel. I thank him for the beginning!

I was inspired to start preaching seriously on St. John’s Gospel! I began my long series in January 1977. There are now more than fifty sermons in it and it is still being added to over forty years later! There is no point at which the text is exhausted. It renews itself and me all the time. I have hopes for its effects on the hearers. The main thrust was to make it come alive in a fresh way for my congregations.

This was meant to happen in two ways. I tried, and am still trying, to relate the content of the message about Christ to personal life. The conviction (and the experience for self and others) is that all that is within us, our interior being, must hear the Gospel. Sadly, so many sermons do not speak to what is actually happening inside us, or in our lives. It is meant to happen for us by allowing a fresh response to the text, free of some of the old traditional issues. The question is, for instance, not so much Did it happen? or What does it (objectively) mean? as What is the impact of this narrative on me and how does it touch me? Later, when the language developed, I discovered this approach was called narrative and reader-response criticism!

Then in 1980 my daughter started her A Level religious education course on St. John’s Gospel! As we swapped testing quotes and questions across the family table, I learnt by heart, for the first time, the content of every chapter and the sequence of every episode and discourse. That was in my development a huge step forward. It is always hard to remember what is in the Gospels, in which one, and in which place! My appreciation grew of the sheer brilliance of the Gospel we have to which we give the name John. The long journey started in earnest to understand how it came to be and what it was saying and how it was saying it, and what it means to us now. That fascination remains. It remains enigmatic and fascinating.²

2. Reading John

2a. Some Parameters I Am Using

Some parameters need to be made clear. I am using John for the end product, and also for the writer whose writing has notionally completed itself in the final product we now work with. We must, we can, let John be John. The narrative-critical approach burst on the scene from literary theory with Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design in 1983. The dominance of historical-critical scholarship gave way to a style of looking at texts as literature, that is as forms of communication that affect those who receive or experience them . . . narrative criticism treats these same texts as mirrors that invite audience participation in the creation of meaning . . . texts shape the way readers understand themselves and their own present circumstances.³ We are in touch with The world barely in front of the text.⁴ The text’s purpose is to lead readers to ‘see’ the world as the evangelist sees it . . . and it is therefore a mirror in which readers can ‘see’ the world in which they live.⁵ We may be looking back on the life of Jesus, but as with all factual and fictional historical reading, we enter the historical world as though we are contemporaries.

A church member said, I love Jane Austen. I read it and I become part of the story. The implication is that it becomes part of me because I feel and behave differently; I am moulded, stirred, and affected (affect) by the story.

There are tools of the trade:

the implied author, the perspective from which the work appears to have been written;

the point of view;

the implied reader, the expectations we have of the effect the text has on the readers who seem to be the target;

the plot, the aim of conveying a meaning in the events;

characters, who appear to be historical yet are intended to convey a message;

style, which contains, for instance, repeated themes, symbolism, double meanings, or irony.

Narrative criticism does not displace historical criticism. John Ashton, who is very wary of the former, can still say, There is no obvious reason why the two approaches should not be combined.⁶

Taking the language at face value is not exhaustive; there is always more to its significance than meets the eye. Sometimes in John it can be said the language does not quite surface.⁷ Wolfgang Iser in The Reader Process asserts, the ‘unwritten’ part of a text stimulates the reader’s creative participation, and quotes Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen: She stimulates us to supply what is not there.⁸ We need a state of readiness for catching similarities.⁹ The continuous implicit communication within the Fourth Gospel is a major source of both its power and its mystery. What seems clear and simple on the surface is never so simple for the perceptive reader because of the opacity and complexity of the gospel’s sub-surface signals.¹⁰ These tools (reader-response and psychodynamic approach) help as a means of assessing the text, and of accessing the impact of the text on the reader. The writer draws us into a world created from materials drawn from life and history as well as imagination and reflection. The narrator speaks retrospectively, telling a story that is a sublime blend of historical tradition and faith.¹¹ [O]ne of John’s most remarkable traits: the unique artistry with which it controls multiple layers of symbolic or associative significance.¹²

2b. John’s Purpose: What Was It?

What was the purpose of John’s writing? Many answers have been given to that question. In the short 125-page introduction by Gerard Sloyan, What Are They Saying About John?, there are seventeen different references to the purpose of the Gospel, each with a legitimate slant! The approach in this work is that it was pastoral. This is a pastoral gospel, or the Pastoral Gospel. What I mean by that is that it deals with, to put it crudely, what goes on inside people and groups. In particular it answers the cry, How does Jesus Christ come to me? How does he get inside me? Or better, How does he give himself to me? At the very start of faith and continuing all through in the faith, I want to know, how does he give himself to me? This surely is the simplest expectation of those drawing near, and hearing talk or reading of the presence of Christ in us, abiding with us, living with us, giving his life to us, giving his life for us. What does it all mean in experience? When I read in earlier writings about union with Jesus, how does it happen? How did Jesus give himself to them, the first Christians? How does he give himself to us?

The Gospel answers that pastoral-theological question through the way John tells the story. The relationship of Jesus, and of the message to individuals and to the group and to the Johannine community, is preeminent. "Only the narrative mode through which a theological claim is made . . . throughout, shows the glory of God revealed in the person of Jesus,"¹³ and connects him to ourselves and enables a response to be made to him. The Gospel clearly is both individually and corporately focused; it responds to the community needs at the time or times of writing, and thus can be perceived as dealing with the group process, and at the same time the experience of the individual is also preferred, as the range of individual profiles makes clear. So my focus, whilst, I hope, not doing injustice to the vast wealth of Johannine scholarship, is on the pastoral impact by utilizing instincts and much experience about personality and pastoral care. Only when the FG is used as a mirror held up to readers’ lives, as the narrator intended, can there be interaction with the glory of Jesus it discloses.¹⁴ It is literature, it is history and art, truth and fiction, "all reconciled in the evangelist’s deft performance. If these are reconciled in the hearers’ lives and with their lives, John can speak to them."¹⁵

In the simplest terms, John indicates his own purpose in writing: that you may believe, continue in believing (present subjunctive) (John 20:31). There is a possible alternative reading, the aorist (past-tense) subjunctive, and it is still possible to think that John is writing for those who already have faith and that the phrase means to have a renewal, or a new impulse in their faith.¹⁶ This is the desired response of reading, for the first time or for all time. Belief is more than responding to signs; it is a change in relationship to Jesus, to each other, and to self. Signs may refer, not just to the Book of Signs, which is postulated as lying behind the Gospel, but to the whole content of the Gospel, sign and word.¹⁷ For that, it is refreshing to substitute for belief the word "trust. That means the impact of the text is so much more fresh. Trusting means, not believe and then so-and-so will happen," but being in a relationship and in it trust grows. The paradox of trust, especially in small group work, is that one only learns to trust by trusting. It is always liminal, crossing a threshold. Trusting is not conditional, but always the experience of mutual gifts, and as such harmonizes with and is transformative of the dynamics of our internal world.

Look at how the whole ministry of Jesus is about crossing boundaries and thresholds:

Chapter 2: social distress;

Chapter 3: a search that is preconditioned;

Chapter 4: sexual and racial and religious conventions;

Chapter 5: thinking about the nature of illness and healing;

Chapter 6: that which really nourishes;

Chapters 7–8: deep-rooted racial memory;

Chapter 9: institutional control of health;

Chapter 10: he actually claims to be the door;

Chapter 11: death of a loved one;

Chapter 13: relating to his own disciples;

Chapters 12–20: his own death, the final barrier, the long good night into which he went with much transcending conversation, the passion and the glory;

Chapters 20–21, where he created a new orientation to shocked disciples. Yet he was still reaching out to and into others, especially those who trusted him. We too are enabled to live liminally in a threshold-crossing fashion.

Philo of Alexandria, contemporary with Jesus, whose thought came from both Judaism and Plato, especially in the use of logos, wrote, to his Word, his chief messenger, highest in age and honor, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator.¹⁸ For Christians the life of Jesus means exactly the opposite, not separation but unity, as John consistently witnesses to. Incarnation means exactly that. Jesus walks with us along the fault lines of our human experience.

Rather than crossing the boundary, Jesus lives on the boundary. Better still, he is the boundary, the gate through which we go back and forth (John 10:7, 9). It is through him and within him that we can move and live, travel the boundaries within ourselves and between others. In Christ! When we are dealing with our psychic nature, this is the John theme par excellence.

My thought is that there is chapter by chapter a revealing of the process, of going through gates with Christ, that occurs in us step by step as we move from distrust to trust, and from not having Christ to having him. When you hear, see these steps, you will respond, will be able to respond. You can respond. This is the way to respond, this is the way you will be enabled to respond. We can experience the gospel, and the Gospel, as the expression of energy that will work in a dynamic way within us and between us. It is the nature of the rich and laden narrative to achieve this. For instance, John’s metaphors, misunderstandings, double meanings, and ironies prompt us to ask, make us ask, What is going on here? The invitation is the same—come higher, go deeper—here in this way Jesus gives himself to you. We search for the realities beneath the appearance, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, but to learn how much and what we could honestly regard as true, believe that and live by it.¹⁹

Re-experiencing the text depends on our capacity for imagination so that what has been concretely located can now be relocated in contemporary experience.

3. Language

We need language to build an adequate picture of things.²⁰

A large proportion of investment in studying John is spent on hearing the language. This means a moderate attempt to both translate and listen to the Greek. I have tried to help those with no knowledge of Greek by including pointers to Greek words. This is needed less as we move through the chapters because we become familiar with words that appear time and time again. Words are transliterated for two reasons: so that we can hear the similarities of sound in the original, and also so that we can see that different English words in the translation may in fact be the same Greek root. It means also having an intensely attentive ear for the nuances of John’s language. The sight of the Greek word also makes connections to other places where John has used it, and thus illustrates the way themes weave in and out of the tapestry. His use of imagery and metaphor is fluid and allows the mingling of ideas. John is like a tapestry with colors and images and threads now surfacing and now hidden. Ronald Ferguson writes of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, George was captivated by the notion of divine creativity in the weaving of tapestries, the threads of which were the raw materials of human life and history.²¹ John’s tapestry in addition weaves in the divine life. The process of reading is to become attuned to the profusion of textual indicators which between them weave the meanings of the narrative . . . to decipher the inner story within the outer story.²² Astonishingly, in the process we will weave ourselves into the tapestry!

In terms of making sense of language, there is an unavoidable fundamental problem. It is partly related to the life situation of the Johannine community, but it is also totally general.

When sacred texts develop to express and define group identity in a context of conflict, they often crystallize these idealizations and projections and preserve them in written form. While these formulations may be appropriate in the formative stages of the religious community, it sets the stage for future distortions. As Paul Ricoeur has observed, something significant happens when communication moves from speech to text. In dialogue, it is possible to clarify ambiguity by direct reference to the surroundings. Once a communication moves into text, however, the direct referential context is lost, and the multiple significances inherent in written language make a variety of interpretations possible.²³

The plain fact is, of course, that we can’t hear the words as spoken. There is no intonation in the New Testament! Yet the way we communicate is by intonation. A distinguished scholar reading a passage in John containing direct speech was already interpreting the meaning because he read with his own intonation. It was loaded with his own view of the character. There is no other way! Every time the language is read aloud we add in our own view. So much of our faith is based, not on what the written words say, but on how we read them. When we want to read afresh, even in our own heads, we must try out all sorts of possibilities of varied tonal voice and emphasis. Every piece of speech was originally spoken in a particular way, and we have no access to it. We simply do not know how the words were said. (And, of course, there is the question of how far John represents what Jesus and others actually said, and how—and the intonation running in his head whilst writing!) When reading text, we have to start with our own ignorance, our own not knowing.

Inscribed on a pavement slab outside a bookshop in Inveraray, Scotland, is, In the river of words ideas are eddies spinning downstream. In John we could also reverse it—in the river of ideas, words are eddies spinning downstream! To sail the sea of Johannine faith is to launch into a sea of metaphors and images—staying, water, birth, seeing, witnessing, breath, spirit, light, dark. Words such as these appear to be simple comparisons, when in reality the images metaphors embody may originate in layers of thought that are usually inaccessible to inspection. It is not only the words that are repeated over and over again, but the metaphorical sense reappears again and again. We do not experience the images solely with cold reason; Figurative language springs from strong affect.²⁴ To refresh ourselves at St. John’s well is to need to sense the imagery afresh.

Metaphors in common usage become faded. So, for example, the word anatomy in the title Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design might enter our minds as, say, just meaning the parts of, or the elements in, or structure of, or, picking up the word design, the plan of. Whereas if the metaphor itself came alive for us, we would be image-ining flesh, blood, eyes, sinews, muscle, breath, heart, bone, movement, a living being, sickness, the wrong sort of growth, dying! John’s metaphors are not used merely as illustrations of propositions; they do not simply refer to theological concepts. They are much too dense for that. They are poetic; in imagination we experience a reality beyond our formulations; such experience is authentic. Culturally we have to live with the anomaly of having concrete statements that we do not interpret literally—Jesus as the Son of God, or the Father, for instance. In getting into John, we continually have to live in the metaphor afresh, without retreating into the fundamentalism of previous eras or contemporary literalism. When everything seems so familiar, we find we have to live on the edge of language.

This seeking of a deeper meaning is not unknown to biblical interpretation. From the earliest Christian times, the text was deemed to have two levels of meaning, a literal (historia in Greek) and a spiritual (theoria). The latter required insight into the symbolic, the hidden, even esoteric, meaning. [T]he worldview of the early church led the early Christians to a more introverted attitude that directed their gaze into the world of the soul, which for them was a living reality . . . the early Christian commentators were natural depth psychologists.²⁵ What is hidden beneath the literal meaning is not merely another and more hidden meaning, it is also a new and totally different reality . . . It is the divine life itself.²⁶ So this interpretation does involve us in looking back on an ancient text through very modern lenses, and through lenses, in particular, that are therapeutically attuned.

The art of interpretation is called hermeneutics, from the Greek word hermeneuo, to interpret, as used by Jesus in Luke 24:27 as he interpreted the scriptures on the way to Emmaus. Hermeneutics is not simply a task of making a meaning from the text that suits the needs of the readers, nor simply a task of unlocking some a priori meaning ensconced in the text. Rather, hermeneutics is a process in which a unique relationship between text and reader evolves.²⁷

Speaking of the need to make the old prophetic faith rooted in old treasured texts credible for today, Walter Brueggemann wants the church’s pastoral task to be committed to the hard work of recovering a style of discourse that makes real now, in concrete ways, the significance of the old message. This needs not just heroic work by a pastor, but an entire community of . . . believers who trust its own way of speech.²⁸

4. The Style of Bible Study Used in the Workshops

My aim in the workshop is both to present the best scholarship I can and also to wish for readers to be open with the biblical text, and to want it to lodge and abide in themselves. (I distinctly remember in Sunday school, at the age of seven, thinking to myself that Daniel could not possibly have survived in a den of lions! What was important was that I was not shocked or fazed by the thought of alternatives.) It means that to take part in a Bible study is to accept that there will be traditional as well as liberal or radical views of event and meaning. Discourse over a passage will contain different points of view. Attitudes will be not only cerebral but heartfelt, and even unconscious. So the aim is both to maximize scholarship (as well as I am able) and also to want others to be nourished, enfaithed. Finding a way through the minefield of Johannine scholarship is as tricky as finding a way through the territory of the human personality! The academic is fascinating, and traditional methods of criticism valid and essential; whilst the personal is also fascinating, essential, and valid in its own way.

Practically all the workshops have been worked through generally, and particularly in a group over about fifteen years in the Enfield, London Circuit of the Methodist Church. I am deeply indebted to them and to all the groups I have worked with, all faithful and adventurous. I take a leadership role, using a table or lectern to set out notes and books with quotations. This could be called a tutorial role. But with pleasure, and I hope some skill, I recognize that the group (of which I also am a member!) has a life, an energy, a cohesion, and a fellowship (koinonia) and will settle the text down into itself, the group, and find it full of significance.

So the method of study includes both a traditional one, a historically based discussion utilising knowledge of the text through the familiar criticisms, and also a recontextualization through meaning felt in group sharing, through social interaction. These social means (John Wesley’s term for sharing personal experience in caring groups) extend the traditional hermeneutic stances. Speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different voices in a group illustrate subtle interpretative interaction and suggest a hermeneutic at work . . . that is not driven by a quest for knowledge, but rather by relational concerns; and by the hope that in their ‘fellowship’ and learning together they will discover insight.²⁹ The groups are indeed meant to do Bible study, but in the context of personal activity. They are what we call experiential or empirical. They look at a text and relate to it, to their inner world, to each other, and to the group process. They practice biblical interpretation in a faith community. [A] social interactionist approach recontextualizes understanding of biblical interpretation.³⁰

In analyzing speech exchange patterns and the interaction of different voices in the group that connect a passage to personal experience, Todd notes that the leader with a tutorial style projects the possibility of a particular kind of response, but when he also invites people to identify their own experience . . . the effect is striking.³¹

Sharing personal material and story is facilitated by the questions asked. They have the effect of contextualizing the passage in our own experience. When the right questions are asked, people are set free to relate to the passage in themselves. The questions are the key. In the question lies the answer.³² They will reflect the mind of the facilitator, but will also open the doors of opportunity, opportunity for the members to speak their mind, to open their minds to the text and to each other. Asking the right question is signally important.

Boxes are used as a simple device to separate sharing activity from the unfolding commentary. Inside the box are one or more questions designed carefully to encourage personal sharing. They are not intended for discussion, but for sharing, with the framework of experience suggested in the passage which is being studied acting as the holding background. Time must be given to this, for members of the group to enter in to the narrative, together with entering into themselves.