st john the apostle

The Apostle and Evangelist St John, was the son of Salome and Zebedee, who both feature in the New Testament, as well as being the brother of St James the Apostle. Zebedee is always described as a fisherman in the Gospels, which he certainly was, but not a poor one, it would seem he was a comparatively wealthy man employing workers and a man of some importance in the Jewish community with access to the High Priest. So John and his brother James came from a wealthy, well connected family but gave up everything to follow Jesus.

John was a follower of John the Baptist, but after the Baptiser saw the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus and knew that He was the Son of God, John and Andrew and others became followers of Christ.  And John, together with his brother James and Peter were really the inner circle of the Apostles, were so close to Jesus that these three were with him during the most important and triumphant times of his earthly life, such as the raising of Jairus’ daughter, Christ’s Transfiguration on the mount, and the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.  At the Last Supper he was seated right by Jesus’ side. 

Dan Brown in his book the Da Vinci Code suggested that it wasn’t John seated at the side of Jesus but Mary Magdalene because John is so young looking, which if you think about it when the Last Supper happened about 33AD, he was a young man and lived until the end of the 1^st century.  He didn’t write his Gospel or the Epistles until about 100 AD. It may have been as early as 95AD, but he was by then a very old man. He clearly was a special friend to Jesus because in his Gospel, he never names himself but refers to himself as the disciple, ‘who Jesus loved’, and this special love manifested itself when Jesus was on the Cross he saw his mother standing beside John and said, ‘Woman, here is your son’, and to John, ‘here is your mother’. And John tells us that from that hour he took care of Mary.

For many people John’s Gospel is the most precious book in the New Testament because of all of the New Testament writers, John has the most penetrating gaze into the eternal mysteries and the eternal truths that God has given us through his Son, Jesus Christ.  Many people who read John’s Gospel find themselves closer to God and to Jesus Christ than in any other book in the world. We have emblems for all the four Gospel writers, Matthew is represented by a Lion, because he saw Jesus as the Messiah and the Lion of Judea; Mark by a human, because his Gospel is the most straightforward and human of the four; Luke by an Ox because it is the animal of universal sacrifice for all people; and John by an eagle, because it alone can look straight into the sun and not be dazzled.  John’s Gospel looks straight to God through Jesus Christ. And that is because John’s Gospel is entirely different to the other three Gospels.  It omits many events that the others include, such as the birth narrative, the baptism of Christ and his temptations; it deals with the Last Supper in an entirely different way; it has a different account of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry; it has a different account of the location of Jesus’ ministry basing it mainly in Jerusalem and Judea, whereas in the other three the main location is Galilee and Jesus doesn’t arrive at Jerusalem until the last week of his life. John tells us so much more than the other three Gospels because he was there with Jesus during his ministry, he was his ‘beloved Disciple’, so he wrote from the perspective of first hand experience, especially about those experiences he and Peter and James witnessed. But there is a more important aspect to John writing this fourth Gospel because by the time John wrote the Gospel account of Jesus two special features had emerged in the Christian  Church which had spread from Jerusalem, mainly through Paul’s missionary work. 

Firstly Christianity had gone beyond the Jewish Christian community which made up the vast majority of early believers, and had spread to the Greek areas of influence, to the Gentile world, where the Jewish genealogies of Jesus’ ancestors were not understood. Most of the Gentile world didn’t know about King David so claiming that Jesus was the Son of David with lineage back to Abraham meant nothing to them, nor the Jewish claim of racial and nationalist ambitions over the territory claimed by the Palestinian people. And secondly the Church was facing a rise of heresy, questioning the humanity of Christ and his divinity.  These heresies would plague the Church for several centuries and led to the Creeds we now profess. John tackled both these problems by writing his Gospel in such a way as to embrace the humanity of Jesus and at the same time stressing the pre-existing deity of Jesus. We see this in the very first verses of the first chapter, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’.

John was explaining to the Greek Gentile Christians who Jesus really was in a way they would understand.  Jesus as the Son of God was undeniably human because he took on our human nature and lived among us, but was undeniably divine because he was with God from the very beginning of the World, and even before that, Jesus was with God throughout all the creation of the universe.  The Jews may have found this difficult but the Greek understanding of philosophy fitted into John’s reasoning. But above all John’s Gospel is a Gospel of love between Christians as a mark of discipleship. ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.....I am giving you these commandments so that you may love one another’.  And in John’s First Letter, he tells his followers, ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love, for God’s love was revealed among us in this way; God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him’. During the last years of his life the Apostle preached only one commandment, ‘Love one another’, his disciples asked him why he kept repeating himself and he replied that this was the most important commandment, and if we fulfil it, then we fulfil all of Christ’s commandments. The more we know about John’s Gospel the more precious they become. 

John was determined to put down in writing all he had seen and experienced in the presence of Christ before he passed into the glorious presence of his Lord and Master, and in reading John we are reading the work of the Holy Spirit, speaking to us of the things which Jesus meant, and who better to tell us the purpose of God’s love which we experience through Christ in our lives than St John the Apostle. Amen.