One of the great ironies of the Gospel of John:
The Greek version of this gospel is on the level of “See spot run.” It’s some of the easiest and most basic Greek that you will read anywhere.
And yet, John fills these simple expressions with the most profound statements of Jesus’ identity and divine nature. It’s no wonder that the Nicene Creed is so indebted to the words of John’s Gospel.
As I have been preaching through this book, I have told our congregation that the Gospel of John is like an ocean. There are parts of it that are shallow enough for a toddler to splash around in complete safety. There are other parts you can swim and realize that you are floating over fathomless depths.
That is the Gospel of John. Profundity in the form of a first-grade reader.
Why did John write his Gospel so differently from the other three? I do not mean to suggest that John’s Gospel is “different” as in “contradictory.” It’s not that at all. Nevertheless, it is different in terms of it’s language and narrative framework. Why did John do this?
I suspect it has a lot to do with his own age and station in life. By the time John finally commits his account to writing, it had been decades since the extraordinary events that unfolded in Galilee and Jerusalem. Decades since he spent three years of his young life following Jesus on foot and witnessing with his own eyes the most extraordinary man who ever walked the face of the earth. Decades since he saw Jesus crucified and raised and ascended into heaven. Decades since the Spirit fell like fire in Jerusalem and eventually thrust the apostles out to the nations and to martyrdom. When he writes, Jerusalem had fallen, the temple had been destroyed by the Romans, and his former life had been erased from the promised land.
John saw all of this and is the last of the apostles to survive, many years after the fact, just as Jesus suggested it would be (John 21:21-23). He is an old man living among the Gentiles in Ephesus when he writes his account. He is not trying to reproduce the masterpieces of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all of which he knew. No, his work is the testimony of an elderly apostle who had spent a long life marinating in the love of God, long after all his brothers had either died or been martyred. He only knows himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” His whole life is summed up in that reality, and so is his Gospel.
So he writes in the direct, simple expressions of an old preacher who has learned how to say the most important things in ways that a child can understand. John also writes such that when the child grows up, he learns that there is more in this Gospel than he ever fathomed as a child. He can spend a lifetime plumbing its depths and never reach the bottom.
