Commented Bible Passages

The theme of life is at the heart of the fourth gospel. John himself declares at the end of his gospel that all he wrote was written “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in so doing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). At the beginning he had proclaimed: “In him was life” (John 1:4). The theme of life is a key for understanding this gospel, forming both a framework and a leitmotif. A framework because, as the two verses just quoted show, John’s gospel is situated between two mentions of the word “life.” An author states: “Wherever you are in John’s gospel, you are never far from the theme of life.”

If the readers are already informed in the prologue that what the Word produced was life, John does not ask them to believe in an abstract affirmation. In the twenty chapters that follow, the gospel-writer shows it to us in many ways. He sets before our eyes what happens when Jesus is present, when human beings interact with Christ and he fills them in their indigence and their desire. The readers can then declare, as the Samaritans do to the woman who met Jesus at the well: “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

The fourth gospel is thus principally a gospel of encounters, especially in what has been called “the book of signs,” the part that goes from the end of the prologue until the end of chapter 12. By following these signs and the human encounters into which they are often inserted, the reader can discover in what this life consists. It is often referred to as “eternal life,” but we must not understand this expression as something that begins only after our death. As a British specialist on John says: eternal life is the healing and transfiguration of life in all the ways that mortal life falls short of life in its fullness.

Following the encounters with Jesus that form the structure of John’s gospel, the reader discovers differently in each of them either an aspect of the gift of life, or the need to which it responds and how it goes beyond expectations, or the way it is bestowed, or a characteristic feature of the giver. The fact that all this occurs through encounters with Christ emphasizes the relational aspect of salvation or the gift of life. Life is communicated to human beings when they leave their self-sufficiency behind, when they admit their thirst to the one who alone can quench it, but who is also a humble God who is thirsty as well. In other words: when men and women enter into relationship with Christ and welcome him. As soon as there is a relationship, God can act.

John invites us to think and to live a freedom that works itself out in a relationship. A creativity that is lived out in a dependency, not a dependency that is unhealthy and restrictive, but that of a tree trunk with respect to its roots.

 In reading through the gospel of John, find three passages that show an aspect of the life which Christ came to bring.

 What does it mean to “abandon our self-sufficiency”? In what way is this liberating?