John's Gospel

GETTING THROUGH THE GOSPELS by Wayne Dixon My friend has passed on now for over a year. But I keep plugging through the gospels. I had suggested that my friend read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and I decided to do the same, just in case any questions came up. I would be prepared, so I thought. I had not anticipated how weighty that rereading could be, seeing it through my friend’s eyes. My friend had never read the Bible. I could cite its familiar contents from the Christmas to Easter story. Perhaps that was the problem, familiarity. It was easy to gloss over its real contents. But now I was reading as if for the first time wondering what my friend would make of it. What did I make of it now for myself? It went slowly. “Let these sayings sink down into your ears,” and they did, a few words at a time, because that’s all I could truly absorb. The readings became daily with a kind of wonder, “What would I find anew today?” I made steady progress through Matthew, Mark, and Luke and found them straightforward and chronological. By the time I got to John I was sailing. John would be easier, I thought from “In the beginning was the word” to “God so loved the world” to “in my Father’s house are many mansions.” These were the cherries on the tree, hand-picked. But now I was overwhelmed by all that unbroken red lettering, whole pages of dialog I’d only skimmed before. John’s presentation is intimate in detail, rendering whole extended conversations. And who was doing the talking, Jesus or John? Scholars must have a field day with that one. What is reporting and what is editorial, however, become irrelevant to the enduring impact of the words. He presents the Christ of transitions, what is and what will be. It is though John wrote from a different dimension, beyond place and time, not unlike the book of Revelation, also attributed to him. I stopped short of John’s last two chapters. I wanted to reread the whole thing first, to let it sink in again, as a book you’re not ready to finish. I ran across a newer version at the thrift store for $1.00 and thought that might help, not that I needed any more Bibles, but it is an interesting comparison. “Wilt thou be made whole?” of the King James Version becomes “Would you like to get well?” Perhaps I should have given my friend a newer translation?