Story

 

 

Vic and I in a mythical Paris restaurant run by the great chef of the family, Christy. 

I have been reading the Gospel of John. I basically switch between Matthew and John, but John is my true love. It often seems to me that the other three’s agenda (Matthew, Mark and Luke) is largely to legitimize Jesus as the Messiah and to lay out his most basic teachings, 

I do not mean to trivialize the teachings by saying they are basic as they are the nuts and bolts of true spirituality. They are so basic (foundational), so hard, so transformative all at the same time that we will need our entire lives to turn into the kind of people who can claim any kind of adherence. Think of it like when C. S. Lewis titled his apologetics, Mere Christianity, even as it simultaneously covers the bare minimum of what is required of us while plumbing the deepest yearnings and pitfalls of our fallen state.

But John—perhaps because it was written later when supposedly people were familiar with the other three—is a deep, deep dive right from the beginning and a treatise on Wonder as it proceeds. In seminary classes they teach you that the Gospel of John is so shallow that even a child can wade in it, yet so deep that an elephant can swim. And it’s true, kinda. As children we (most of us in my generation, anyway) learned “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son so  . . .  So on and so on. And a few other easily memorized pieces even as we had no idea what a profound piece of theology we were reciting. 

But John is only shallow if one pitter-patters along the very edges and doesn’t think too long and hard about what one is reading. 

I would like to point out just one amazing thing in today’s post. John starts with this huge philosophical, theological statement on the divinity of Jesus. It’s poetic, it’s beautiful, it’s mystical in its reach: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And so on and so on. 

Then, right when we settle in for an ethereal essay on divinity and ontology, we’re plopped into a very humble, real-life wedding. 

Matthew, Mark and Luke start by either detailing Jesus’s miracles of healing the sick or by declaring his legitimate right to the title Son of God, by quoting the Old Testament. 

John starts with the metaphysical, adds an introduction of the major characters, and yes, a nod to his claim as the Son of God, then (seemingly) abruptly changes course and drops us into not a grand healing or scripture quoting, but a small-town celebration, a wedding. It’s local, the problem is really not all that important. The wedding hosts are running out of wine. That’s a pretty small problem in any time in any place in the history of humanity. But John swoops right from the cosmos to the ordinary. 

We are not understanding John at all if we do not understand why he did this. We do not understand the theology of John, and how John understood who Jesus was if we do not see the connection between the unutterable majesty of God and the Cosmos and a simple celebration between friends and family. 

The story of the water into wine is not about Jesus’s ability to supersede the chemical makeup of water, it’s personal. It’s about celebration, and empathy. This is why John starts this way. For all its glory and wonder, he is telling us, the Story of God is about celebration and empathy. It’s about how infinite, measureless Grace enters into the most everyday human endeavors.

I would like to write another time about another feast, another story of grace, this one written by Isaak Denison (Karen Blixen) of Out of Africa fame. Her short story, “Babette’s Feast,” is the perfect parallel to the first two chapters of John’s gospel; they both start with a story that reads mythical, almost parabolic, but then the focus narrows into how grace enters our reality and plays out among us. 

If you get a chance read the story or watch the movie—the movie is very good but you will miss some of the symbolic language if you don’t read the story too—and we can look at it together another time. 

Thanks for reading.