Mitchell, Brody, Shannon, and Shelby,
If there was any doubt that different people named John wrote the various books credited to someone with that name, it hasn't taken much a root in me. Just today, I flipped open to my Good News Translation and read the first epistle my page turned to. That happened to to be the first letter of John.
I didn't look at the title on the page. I didn't even recognize any of the text, since I never memorized this epistle. Yet, I knew right away whose letter I had stumbled upon.
See if you can spot it:
"We write to you about the Word of life, which has existed from the very beginning..."
That. That right there. Do you see it? You do, don't you?
"In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Certain New Testament writers have a distinct personality when they write, and you can gather a bit from their literary decisions. Paul, for example, is a bit sarcastic, but the more I read, the more I begin to think that he was a little full of himself. He was definitely abrasive, and I can just imagine him slipping into Rush Limbaugh mode whenever he had a disagreement with someone. He said himself that he had an intense argument with Simon Peter. We tend to put him on some sort of pedestal, as if everything about him was exemplary and should be mimicked, but I sometimes wonder about that one. He was broken like everyone else, and you had to look past all that in order to see the fruits of the Spirit.
John is distinct, too. Like Paul, he had a flair for things larger than life. Except he didn't make mountains of out molehills. He looked, and everywhere he saw mountains, mountains, and more mountains.
I read his literary style. There's the opening to his gospel, and then the opening to his first epistle. Then, there's the book of Revelations. It's as if after the first few tries weren't enough, he thought "If that didn't catch their attention, this will do the trick."
More or less, he succeeded. Jesus is the Alpha and Omega, and someday there will be a tremendous Armageddon of thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone, and a final judgment. His imagery was poignant and still sticks with us today, inspiring the our very understanding of literature itself.
For now, though, I limit myself to his first letter, and keep in mind his style elsewhere for reference. Using that, I develop a lens through which to read this gospel, a perspective to always keep in mind.
And that is, John sees something huge. I am convinced that if John saw anything in the future, he saw Ludwig von Beethoven composing the 5th Symphony.
Beethoven made everything huge, everything amazing. He dove into his music passionately, and we all may or may not be familiar with that painting of him conducting, his hair wild as though struck by an electric shock. I can imagine the intensity in the focus he put into each of those masterpieces, with an Uncle Vernon vein about to explode over his forehead and a Clint Eastwood squint and a clenched jaw.
He composed this music even as deafness crept up on him. Why would he do that? What was the point? Could it be that music was his passion? Or maybe that music haunted him, and he couldn't live with himself if he didn't share it with the rest of us. Perhaps he heard it coming from somewhere, from God Himself, and that was why the music was so big.
In any case, Beethoven did not make a mountain of a molehill. What he pulled inspiration from was never small to begin with.
In that same way, I can just imagine John sitting down to write his letters. He's listening to Beethoven music, and he's connected to a much higher reality. He's looking through a portal into the fundamental conflicts of the universe, and he's probably wondering how on Earth he can find the words to describe it all.
Maybe that was why the Gospel of John appeared last. Imagine you're like him, knowing how you came across something as huge as God Himself. Maybe you would write everything you saw down right away, but it seems that he just ran out and told everyone. That guy was a natural writer, but I think he didn't want to rush into what would clearly be his greatest masterpiece. If he was going to write about his experience with Christ, he was going to be like Beethoven, who wanted more than just a catchy opening note. Every instrument had to be perfectly tuned. Everything had to be just so.
What I do know is that he didn't just write this in his gospel. He wrote like this in his other works, too, which brings us back to this letter.
Because this news is huge. Huge. It's as big as Beethoven. It's as big as the warmhole in Interstellar. It's as big as the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, It's as big as Star Wars. It's as big as Superman. It's as big as the surface of the sun. It's as big as the Big Bang. It's as big as God.
As big as, and even bigger.
Because even God is bigger than he had ever imagined.
It was more than that, though. He didn't have to imagine what God was like. He didn't have to expand his imagination to figure out this titanic knowledge. Because the verse doesn't stop there. His first complete thought in the letter doesn't end until he tacks on...
"We have heard it, and we have seen it with our eyes; yes, we have seen it, and our hands have touched it."
So truth isn't some abstract idea.
Okay, queue the Beethoven again.
So where do I begin? Where do I possibly begin? I've spent this entire entry doing nothing but beginning, but as of yet I really haven't put my finger on it, haven't quite gone on my way.
Disney came out with this remarkable thing called Fantasia 2000 and opened with the single most recognizable piece of classical music in history. There are many stories of how Beethoven came up with such a supremely inspired piece of music. Out of all of them, the one I'm inclined to believe is the one where he wasn't inspired in order to create the music, but rather he heard it. And it wasn't in his head. He heard it in the the blasts of thunder that followed a clash of lightning. He heard it, experienced it, and wrote it down.
So John never approached this new theology with reason. He actually experienced the theology and touched Jesus with his hands. He could never have come to this faith otherwise.
What John paints here is a picture of a story. The big story. He looks back, and he's fascinated by the big picture. He couldn't possibly settle for understanding something smaller, especially when the big picture came knocking at his door.
John was a first century time traveler. I know this because he met Jesus, and Jesus was the Alpha and Omega. He was the beginning and the end of the Creation story, God's story in all things, incarnate in the present moment. Just by touching Jesus, he came into physical contact with the opening prologue over all creation, the climax that changed everything, and the promised epilogue of a renewed world. It was like a plotline.
Therefore, the opening to this passage is inherently eschatological. Everything — everything — he's about to discuss must be viewed in that context.
That is to say, he's writing as though there's a story with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. Introduction, rising action, climax, and conclusion. He looks at the world and sees Creation, man's Fall, God's Redemption, and the ultimate Consummation. And the conflict he sees, the movement and the spiritual war he sees going on, is as massive as two tectonic plates rubbing against each other.
Think of how Fantasia 2000 used the 5th Symphony. We take that imagery for granted, a simple cosmic struggle between good and evil, but this view is inherently biblical. If you go and watch some anime, which has Shintoist and Buddhist influences, you rarely ever see appeals to anything ultimate, and there usually isn't a narrative so definitive. Many of the world's religions see the struggles of the world as being ongoing, without any beginning and without really an end, either. It's all cyclical. The Yin and the Yang? That proposes that there's no good without evil, and vice versa.
Fantasia 2000 doesn't adhere to that logic. In this, light appears out of nowhere. It's grand, triumphant, supreme, all-encompassing, monolithic. It comes from on high, from above, from some untraceable origin, from beyond our perceptions of reality itself.
Then this beam hits the clouds, and something about it fundamentally changes. Some sort of miracle. Light, the stuff of life, empties itself. It becomes shimmering, life giving water.
It hits the ground. Life. Color. A cultural mandate. For a moment, everything is perfect.
Then something happens. Something strange, something odd. When it comes to surface, it turns out that it is in fact quite terrible.
There's struggle, warfare, enough to make everything tremble. The earth shakes, the world transforms. Loved ones get hurt and taken away. We find ourselves outcasts, separated from each other, alone, and chased to the ends of the earth. Pain and suffering become very real. It stays like this for a while.
Surrounded, but somehow protected by a small light they carry with them. Then from beyond, the big light comes again. It destroys that which was evil. It robs them of power. It permanently rids the world of it.
Life again. Lost ones return. Everyone, even the cripples, return to the light. And it was very, very good.
Lesson learned. Or was there a lesson? Wasn't it just a nice story? In reality, it's both. There's a lot to learn from the story if indeed that story forms the foundations for reality itself. It isn't an abstract story, either, because John encountered its main character and touched Him.
You know, these things can always seem so distant, and it can be easy to put them off. But when God meets you face to face, it's hard to ignore. And when He tells you where you came from and what this is all amounting to, how do you react?
I once read a portion of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. He was wondering what this elusive eudaimonia was, and didn't have much of an answer. Like all naturalists, he left things incomplete with his basic presupposition that happiness was doing good things. It never quite amounted to anything. He could never determine a human activity that was a means unto itself, the ultimate end.
What John proposes here flips those Greek notions on their heads. Now there is an ultimate end. Now there is a purpose to human life.
All our lives, we're going somewhere. We might not put it that way, but we feel it. We're the main characters of our own stories, and every good story has a good twist and a good ending. Everything fleshes out, and we arrive. At least, if we wrote a book about it. That's how intuitively we feel things should be. In real life, it doesn't always feel that way. We live, then we die, and it doesn't seem as if our dying breath was particularly more fulfilled than our first.
What the Gospel promises us, though, is that our stories will turn out as they ought to. At the end of days, with the resurrection of the dead.
Everything will be as it ought to.
We will have fulfillment.
And along the way, I can't help but feel that there should be some awesome music, so writers named John can bang their heads like they're Wayne Campbell.
...
Long spiel there? I know! But I suppose I knew what I was going into there when I thought to write a commentary on that one verse alone. I sincerely have trouble wrapping my thoughts around the implications of the language, and as they say, the first line in any book is always the most important.
I guess it was a success. He hooked me and I suppose I will have to share my thoughts on the rest of the letter, but later. I love eschatology, partially as a nerd, but mostly as a writer. It helps me figure things out, what's important, and what's real. So of course, I understand that the rest of the letter is important, too, and they tell me unique things about that story, but I had to first set the tone.
My greatest regret is that, in all this commentary about the big things, I didn't mention any Grace. Really, it should make its way into everything, but I do hope to see a clear connection between God's story and God's character of Grace as I move along.
What do others think? Should we be particularly moved when we read grand statements about the Beginning and the Word? Is it as amazing as I think it is? How much does this relate to other areas of faith and the questions a new Christian or an outsider might have? Or if I take much of a visible interest in this, do I make my faith inaccessible to others? What does this have to do with personal testimony?
I'm curious.
Shannon, Shelby, you might recognize some of my crazy talk from the Michael D. Williams book Far As the Curse is Found, back from those old Core classes. Of all of the books I have completed on my bookshelf, I'd say that this one and Boundaries were among the most useful and insightful, so I recommend it to anyone. I might give away mine and buy another one so I can be underline with a little more design.
I will write again whenever I have the time. Mitchell and Brody, continue with your hard work and just know that school has been coming along for me, too. Shannon, keep on blogging. Shelby, say hello to Hannah for me. Peace be with you!
Sincerely,
John Hooyer
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