With the Benefit of Hindsight: Any Single Moment in the Gospel Draws on the Whole Life and Ministry of Jesus

John 1: 6-14                                                    January 27, 2021

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth

            Where did we come from?  Jesus came into the world that He brought into being, but he was unknown to them.  Where are we going?  To consider what is given to those who ‘believed in His name’.  Where are we?  Jesus came to what was ‘his own’, and ‘his own people did not accept him.’

            In a novel, when an author takes the compositional risk of foreshadowing, they are deliberately hinting at what is to come.  The gospel is not a novel.  Neither is it a historical work, at least not by modern standards.  What John is sharing comes from the benefit of hindsight, from where he is in the moment of writing in the light of Jesus' entire ministry and its aftermath, and reflecting back.  For me, that provides context to this sentence.

            Coming into it is a universal, the world, came into being through Jesus, and the world did not know him.  Now it narrows to ‘his people’.  He is Jewish and, aside from a few minor excursions, his entire ministry was amongst the Jews.  Galilee to Jerusalem and back again, with some side trips into the ‘questionable’ region of Samaria and, as I said, a couple of side trips.  He went to Tyre, on the coast of the Mediterranean north of the Promised Land, and to the Decapolis, a region of ten cities, “Deca…” means Ten and “…polis” means City, a Greek settled region to the north and east of the Sea of Galilee.

            All this is to say that Jesus came as the Messiah, he came first to the Jews.  They were his own people.  In the end, his own people did not accept him.  The ministry of Jesus did not renew the Jewish faith as a whole to the acceptance that God’s Messiah had come.  Instead, it led to a split within Judaism as Jesus’ teachings passed out and along to the Gentile world, and we became the Christian religion.  John lived long enough to see this split (see the sidebar), and, as he shares this sentence, it is an application of hindsight.  Jesus’ message was universally available, but not universally accepted.  Along with that message came the consequences, which will be reflected in tomorrow’s sentence.

Side Bar: John.  So we have touched on the reality that we have names attached to the Gospels but we do not have ‘autographs’.  Nowhere does it say, “I, John, am bringing you the gathered recollections of the Savior…”  So, scholars have argued (and it is arguable whether these arguments are for the sake of advancing our understanding of the Bible or these arguments are for the sake of arguing…), again scholars have argued about pretty much every name attached to the writing of a Biblical book. 

            One argument that is used against authorship (as in "John did not write John") is an analysis of the internal structure of the book.  For example, there are ‘clues’ inside the Gospel of John that it was written later than anyone who could have had insider knowledge of what the geography of Jerusalem and the Promised Land looked like.  This works around the historical ‘barrier’ of 70 AD.  In 70 AD (or CE), the Jewish revolt started, which destroyed the City and the Temple and much of the Promised Land.  On the strength of his victory, Titus was elevated to Emperor afterward.  So the argument goes that when we read the Gospels, we can date them by what they know or do not know about Jerusalem before the Revolt.

            Against this, consider John the Apostle.  He was the youngest of Jesus’ disciples, tradition puts him born around 6 AD.  He is also the only one who did not die the martyr’s death, but lived to an exceptionally ripe old age for that time period.  Wikipedia reflects the general acceptance that he died in his 90’s, somewhere around 100 AD (or CE).  He also lived out the end of his life in exile on the island of Patmos (his location according to the Book of Revelations-the last of the New Testament).  So he lived both sides of the Jewish Revolt.  He knew the City before and he knew the City afterward.  So his knowledge base, if the author, is in line with the content of the gospel.

Nomenclature: AD and CE.  'Anno Domino', Latin for 'Year of our Lord' versus CE, 'Common Era'.  These are years measured after the birth of Jesus.  Their counterparts are BC and BCE, 'Before Christ' and 'Before the Common Era'.  AD and BC emerge from the Christian tradition, measured from and acknowledging the birth of Christ as the start of the calendar (Judaism and Islam both have different starting years).  CE and BCE are an attempt to ‘de-Christianize’ the calendar, renaming it the "Common Era".  As this calendar has emerged as the 'standard' for the world, removing religious references is an accommodation (which I consider proper and respectful) to the reality that not everyone believes what we believe.