Taste life in John's Gospel

I would encourage anyone with a spare couple of hours to read the Gospel of John looking out for what Jesus, through John, wants us to know about “life”.

Jesus calls his Father “the living Father” (6:57). Like all beings that have life he is not inactive but outgoing and like human fathers he gives life to his child, Jesus (6:57). However, unlike human fathers who give life in the act of conception and maybe through loving nurture, God the Father is always giving the Son life by his Holy Spirit. It doesn’t say that he “gave” life to Jesus in the past tense because from the very beginning the Son has been with the Father (1:1-2). As the early Christian church taught, the Son was “eternally begotten of the Father”. The alternative would mean that there was a time when the Father was not giving life - which would actually mean that he was static, dead, and not “the Father” because he didn’t have a Son!

So, God the Father and Son are living and always have been.

But, what does it mean to be living?

Clearly, until Jesus became a man God did not have a pumping heart or electricity pulsing through his brain. But we all know that there is more to life than organic mechanisms. Relationships are at the heart of what it means to be living, so Jesus shows the depth of his understanding in describing life for human beings to be found in knowing him and his Father (17:3). Within God the Trinity, Jesus lives for his Father, and his Father lives for him. As parents often say that their children are their “life”, God the Father could say the same for his Son.

But we recognise that while there is something good about someone looking for their life in other people, whether children or lovers, there is also something self-destructive. Jesus saw that clearly in the woman that he met by a well in Samaria (4:1-45). She had married five times and was now living with a sixth man. We don’t know the details but it is clear that by her fault, their fault, or perhaps nobody’s fault she was not finding in men the life that she wanted. When Jesus offers her “living water” that won’t just quench her thirst for a while but satisfy forever she longs to have it (4:10-15). We are just the same as that woman. Looking for life in other people or things we may be satisfied and feel ‘alive’ for a while, but as time passes we either find they don’t satisfy as they used to, or they’re taken away. Nothing lasts, but everything seems to die in the end. We are all thirsty for lasting life - or as John’s Gospel calls it, “eternal life”.

But the Son doesn’t experience this thirst for life when he lives for his Father. His Father is God and has infinite resources of life and joy that leave the Son eternally and infinitely alive. If we want to have our thirst quenched we will have to receive from this heavenly well too.

Thankfully Jesus is his Father’s Son. As the Father has life in himself, he has given it to his Son to have the same (5:26). And as he loves to give life to his Son, the Son also loves to give life to us (4:14, 4:50, 10:28, etc). So with the Father and by the Holy Spirit, God the Son made the world (1:10). A world reflecting the character of its maker and teeming with life.

But as well as life, we sadly also experience death in this world. In the book of Genesis, God teaches us that the reason for this is because he cut us off from the “tree of life” - that is from a close relationship with himself - because we chose to rebel against him. Humanity didn’t trust him to provide us with life, so we tried to take over the world so we could provide for ourselves. Like the woman at the well we started looking for life somewhere other than God. God had only ever done us good and had unfailingly given us life but we were ungrateful and disobedient because we didn‘t trust him to keep on providing and we thought we could do better on our own.

This is the world we all find ourselves in now. There is life and goodness, but there is also death and evil. The Bible is clear that the death and evil is our fault, but that God has lovingly kept on giving us some life and goodness to keep us going. But this imperfect and short life that we know by experience is not the end of the story, because God did not just create, but became a creature. That is the story we find in the Gospels. God the Son became flesh (1:14)!

But why would God who is life and light come into the darkness that we know all too well (1:5) and die as we die under judgement?

Jesus says that he came into this world scarred by death to give us “abundant life” (10:10). All through John’s Gospel Jesus is explaining how he gives life (4:14, 4:50, 10:28, 11:43, 17:2).

God is a god who just keeps on giving, despite our ingratitude! That is truly amazing. But what is even more amazing is how he gives and how much he gives.

Jesus does not just dole out life from heaven, or just give us what he has to spare. He gives us all the life that he has because that is the only way that the death in our world can be overcome. As I have said the Bible teaches that death is in the world because of the rebellion that we have staged against the giver of life. This rebellion and lack of trust is what the Bible calls sin. To get rid of death so that life can be given again sin has to be got rid of first. So right at the beginning of John’s Gospel, John the Baptist recognises that Jesus came to take away the sin of the world by being “the Lamb of God” (1:29).

To twenty-first century Britons, “the Lamb of God” is a strange title to give Jesus, but to the Jews of Jesus’ day it was loaded with meaning. Being a lamb to the Jews meant being a sacrifice. So John was saying that Jesus came to be a sacrifice of a life that would take away our sin and death. Strikingly, right at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry John the Baptist was pointing to Jesus’ death. This was not just a prediction but was Jesus’ own intention from the very beginning (10:18). As a consequence all four Gospels are dominated by Jesus’ deliberate journey to death on a cross.

But from the larger context of John’s Gospel it emerges that John the Baptist had in mind a particular lamb sacrifice. Once a year, at Passover, Jewish families killed a lamb in the place of their eldest son. John the Baptist understood that Jesus, the Son of God, had come to die as the ultimate lamb in the place not just of one person, but of all the world.

In order to benefit from the Passover sacrifice the Jews used to eat the lamb that they had killed in the place of their son. Shockingly to the Jews that he met, Jesus says that those who want to benefit from his sacrifice have to do something similar. They have to eat him (6:51-58)!

Why does Jesus say something so disgusting?

In the first place, he says it because food is how we live. Without the energy we get from food we would die, and Jesus is saying that without him we will also die.

Secondly, by referring so starkly to his “flesh” and “blood” he is pressing home that in order for us to live he had to die. This food didn’t grow on supermarket shelves but cost him dearly.

Although it may not have been clear to the Jews listening to Jesus, it was clear to John the Gospel-writer that Jesus didn’t mean that his body was going to be carved up for the disciples to eat after he died on the cross. As we find out later in the Gospel, although Jesus died he was laid in a tomb and raised to new life in his own body, so we must “eat” him in a different way.

But how can we eat Jesus?

Many people think that in order to get eternal life we have to do something like exercise. We have to work hard at being the best person we can be and if we finish in the top few we will win a prize. But when Jesus says that to get eternal life we have to eat then that should make us realise that this is entirely the wrong way to think about things.

Instead of impressing, we get eternal life by receiving Jesus as a gift. Right at the beginning of the Gospel, John writes about people who “receive” Jesus by believing him (1:11-12). Throughout the Gospel John says that those who “believe” in Jesus have life (3:15, 4:50, 6:47, 11:26). Then at the end of the book John explains that the whole reason that he wrote it was that “you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life” (20:31). To eat Jesus you have to believe that he is good to eat, which means believe that he is who he says he is and that he can give life.

Jesus may be drawing a parallel with the story of how humanity lost life in the first place in the Garden of Eden. In the Garden of Eden God provided a “tree of life” which Adam and Eve ate from in order to live. They distrusted God’s promise that this tree would give them life and thought they would do better eating from another tree. Similarly we have a choice. Do we believe that Jesus can give us life by his death, or will we believe the promises of the advertisements we see, or the advice we hear, that we can get life somewhere else?

Jesus gives us his own life for free. There is nothing we have to do to enjoy it, simply take and eat and enjoy. But there are other things we can trust to give us life. Careers take our time, possessions take our money, religions take our good works, but none of them give us what they promise. Jesus said that he is “the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [him]” (14:6). As we have mentioned at the beginning “life” and relationship “to the Father” are the same thing. Without believing the Son that he is “life” from the Father we will “perish” (3:16), and be judged by the God the Father (3:36, 5:29) who will not tolerate us calling his beloved Son a liar. Without his sacrificial death to take away our sin, we remain stuck with the consequences of the choice of humanity from Adam to the present day to disbelieve God and chose the wrong meal. So like Adam and Eve, we will remain hungry and thirsty, dissatisfied, and ultimately we will decay and die.

How much better to chose life? To chose a relationship with God the Father who is more awe-inspiring than the universe he created and more loving than anyone we have ever met. To chose to know Jesus as our brother who was willing to die for us even when we disregarded him. To chose to receive God the Holy Spirit to live with us (14:17). God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit united in giving us themselves at such great cost!

It may seem odd that Jesus presents himself as a free gift which we just need to receive. Jesus predicts that believing his offer for life may mean that people mock you or worse (15:18-20). Believing Jesus also means we will trust him when he says that the best thing for us to do with our lives is to love people to the extent that he loved us (13:34). That cost him his life, so if we believe him we will seek to give up all that we have for the sake of other people, including our money, time and care.

In some ways this is a ‘cost’ of believing in Jesus. But as when a husband gives himself to his wife she shares his possessions along with him, we will one day also share in all that he possesses. As the bride of the owner of the universe the church will be given the whole earth to share with him. All those things that we may end up giving up when we believe Jesus’ radical promise to provide all we need to live, we don’t really give up because we will receive them all back when we are married to Jesus when he comes again (cf. 3:29, 2 Cor 11:12, Eph 5:29-32, Rev 19:7). Jesus gave up everything, even his life, and yet was given everything including his life back again from the Father as a gift. As followers in a similar way we may lose everything but we will also receive everything, and more, back from the Son when we are raised from the dead (4:14, 4:50, 5:29, 10:28, 11:43, 14:19, 17:2). As Jesus says, whoever “loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (12:25).

So if you want to have the life Jesus promises, in relationship with his living Father and by his Spirit, then we must come to him (5:40), look to him (6:40), listen to him (5:25), and believe him. There is no other place to find eternal life (6:68), and there is no better life to live than one of perfect relationship with God and each other (Chap 17).

“Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Psalm 34:8).