Themes and Theology in the Book of John

The Revealer

As mentioned before, it is pretty unique that Jesus in John’s Gospel is a self-aware Messiah throughout the entire story. This awareness earns Jesus the title of “revealer,” meaning he spends most of his life “revealing” that he is the Messiah to all of these other dumb-founded religious and political leaders and crowds and disciples who just haven’t “gotten it” yet.

The Word, theSon of God

In the Gospel of John, Jesus is connected to Christians, not through the line of David, but through the ENTIRE CREATION OF COSMOS.

What a statement.

but...What does this mean for us? 

The World is Apart from God

This gospel gives HUGE attention to dualism: light and dark, Jesus and the Devil, good and evil... 

So.. the world, in its path away from God, is being saved. For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son for OUR sakes. We were turning to evil, and Jesus saved us... but the most notable part is:

Jesus was not a superman. He did not battle. He was sacrificed.

Jesus is a sacrificial lamb.

As a child growing up in a standard Presbyterian church, I had NO idea what this meant. NO ONE I knew ever sacrificed a lamb for anything, and this became yet another meaningless mantra of our cultic prayers... until I was much older that I realized the importance of this parallel. 

The sacrificial lamb was a Jewish tradition for Passover, the holiday that celebrates the Israelites’ escape from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. In Moses’s time, the lamb was sacrificed and offered to God, and its blood was spread across the door to protect the first borns from the angel of death. 

Many scholars argue that the sacrifice of Jesus occurred at the SAME TIME as the sacrifice of the lamb for the holiday of Passover... but this time, instead of the lamb for the first born, it was Jesus for the ENTIRE WORLD.

That imagery was a beautiful and powerful statement for those who were living within the Jewish culture- and it still can be powerful for us today. 

If there is one thing to be said about John and his Gospel, it’s that he lived up to his name of “the Evangelizer” through this magnificent work.