Today is Transfiguration Sunday. Churches usually spend this last Sunday before Lent reading and reflecting on the story of Jesus’ dazzling transformation on a mountaintop. There’s a good liturgical reason for this timing: the Transfiguration serves as a preview of Christ’s ultimate glory and exultation in the Resurrection. It gives us the theological context for Jesus’ earthly life as we prepare to enter Lent.
But – well – we’ve run into a problem this time around. As has become tradition for us here at Boone, we’ll be spending the six weeks of Lent reading straight through one of the gospels from beginning to end. But this year’s gospel is John, and John doesn’t HAVE a transfiguration account to ground us during this time of liturgical transition. It doesn’t offer a “mountaintop experience” to contextualize all the rest of the stories that we’re about to hear. It doesn’t fit into the mold of the other three gospels.
But as inconvenient as it is for our purposes, that’s actually fairly typical of John. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap in significant ways (earning them the collective nickname of the “synoptic gospels”), John is in a category all its own. Its author does things his own way, omitting some stories that we might consider essential (like the Transfiguration, for example) and including others that aren’t found anywhere else in Scripture: the wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, and the foot washing at the Last Supper, to name a few. Since John was the last gospel to be written, its author was probably familiar with the other three to one degree or another, but instead of using them as resources or templates, he chose to go in an entirely different direction instead.
In all likelihood, the reason for John’s divergence wasn’t due to disagreements or competition with his predecessors. No, John’s gospel was written not as a replacement for the other three, but rather to meet an emerging need within the evolving Church community. By the end of the first century CE, Christianity was growing and spreading to new audiences, and these new audiences were raising new questions of theology. Matthew, Mark, and Luke had already established Jesus’ credentials as a Jew, his teachings as a rabbi, and his ministry as a human being. What was missing, John seems to imply, was an emphasis on Jesus’ divinity.
See, John wanted to demonstrate to the Church’s ever-increasing gentile population that this new movement was bigger than any one culture or ethnicity. It wasn’t JUST about the Jewish people finally getting their Messiah (although it WAS that); it was about God breaking into the world in a brand-new way for the sake of ALL humanity. So instead of beginning with Jesus’ birth or baptism – markers of his earthly life – John’s author reaches all the way back before creation to start his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word WAS God…What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people.” John didn’t NEED a Transfiguration account to provide theological context – its very first words show that the entire gospel is intended to serve that purpose!
Although we almost exclusively hear this prologue in the context of Christmas, it’s much more than a enigmatic stand-in for the nativity. It literally sets the tone for everything that comes after it. John was never meant to be a historical document in the way that we understand history today; it’s an unapologetically theological document – arguably even more so than any of the other gospels. It wasn’t written to provide a “carefully ordered account”, as Luke’s gospel describes itself; John was written (quote) “so that [the reader] will believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God…and that, believing, [they] may have life in his name.”[1] So as we read through this unusual gospel over the next six weeks, we should keep the author’s intentions, rather than our own assumptions, at the top of our minds.
Now, this is a more difficult task than we might imagine. Assumptions can be tricky to manage, especially when we don’t realize the impact that rhetoric can have on them. For example, John often uses dichotomies to emphasize a point: he repeatedly uses themes of light versus dark, “the Jews” versus the Christ-followers, old life versus new life, and so on. In fact, it’s these very divisions in John that form the basis of our Lenten theme this year (“A Line in the Sand”). It’s an effective rhetorical strategy precisely because it provides us with a ready-made framework for our thinking.
But if we aren’t careful to hold this “black-and-white” thinking in tension with the shades of gray that we know exist, it can get us into trouble. We may become tempted to start seeing the world exclusively through the lens of such dichotomies – as “us versus them”; “this versus that” – instead of understanding them as a strategically simplified version of reality. We can’t forget that, although light can be used as rhetorical shorthand for “good”, there are also times when dark is good. We can’t forget that, although some Jewish people may have felt anxiety about Jesus’ ministry, Jews and Christians aren’t enemies. We can’t forget that, although we have indeed been given new life in Christ, it doesn’t undo the ways we may have hurt others in our past. If we forget these things, then we risk sliding into toxic theologies that pull us farther away from God – which is the last thing that John’s author would want.
Just as we can’t separate the theology of John from our understanding of reality, we also can’t read John in a vacuum apart from the other canonical gospels. You may notice that, whereas the synoptics spend a lot of time talking about community, John focuses much more on personal relationships with God – community doesn’t seem very important to the fourth gospel. And while Matthew, Mark, and Luke tend to emphasize the building of a kindom where all creation can coexist in peace and unity, John is more concerned about each individual’s spiritual rebirth to eternal life.
But even though these may seem like conflicting theologies, it doesn’t mean that we have to choose one – that one is right and the other must therefore be wrong. It just means that they each have something different to teach us. It’s our responsibility as people of faith to figure out how all these lessons fit together.
It’s easy for us to get wrapped up in the mysterious, metaphysical nature of John’s teachings, to be tempted to “think about the things above and not things on earth,” as the epistle to the Colossians[2] suggests. But even though this gospel is trying to step back and capture a bigger part of the theological picture, it’s still only one part of the picture. There are three other gospels, twenty-six other New Testament books, and sixty-five other books of canonical Scripture – not to mention the revelation that we receive through our own faith and relationship with Christ – all with more to tell us.
We can’t learn all there is to know about Jesus in any single document – even one as interesting and unique as John. Indeed, the gospel itself warns us not to consider it a comprehensive account. It ends by informing us that “Jesus did many other things as well. If all of them were recorded, I imagine the world itself wouldn’t have enough room for the scrolls that would be written.”[3] Jesus is more than any book can contain. That’s why our holy scriptures are a collection of writings compiled over thousands of years, why we’ve studied them throughout the centuries, and why we’re still learning new things from them today.
The Word that was in the beginning, both with God and sharing its being with God, is an incredible, living thing. So as we dig into John’s gospel in the coming weeks, as we hear stories that aren’t found anywhere else in Scripture and a perspective on Christ’s life unlike any other, let’s remain humble and open to the Spirit’s movement. Let’s allow this gospel to expand our understanding of God, rather than put limits on it. And let’s hear how God’s Word is still speaking to us even today. Amen.
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[1] John 20:31.
[2] Colossians 3:2.
[3] John 21:25.
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