Divine Diamond: Facets of the Fourth Gospel

By Kevin O'Gorman

The Gospel of John (‘the Fourth Gospel’) is presented through the symbol of a diamond. With the motif of light dominant from the opening Prologue culminating in the saying of Jesus, ‘I am the light of the world’, the symbol of diamond draws on this to indicate the constant inter-flow of its method and style. Like light falling on a diamond and flowing from facet to facet the themes of the Gospel of John are highlighted and held together. This creates a dynamic which is circular, drawing those who read and pray the Gospel into a deeper understanding of its spirituality and theology.

After an Introduction ten themes are chosen. These are Light, Life, Truth, Home, Joy, Peace, Freedom, Glory, Mission, Love.

Together they represent the revelation that the evangelist elucidates, expressing  the relationship that God the Father wishes to have with people through  His Son in the Holy Spirit. While drawing on the commentaries of scripture scholars and writings of theologians to interpret the import of particular passages and verses, this is a study of the so-called ‘Spiritual Gospel’, an appellation that has been attributed from the time of the Alexandrian school in the third century. Called to believe in Jesus the Word made flesh and come to belong to the Father through the bond of love borne by the Holy Spirit the spirituality of the Gospel of John is an invitation to intimacy with the triune God which issues in (as indicated by words of the Second Vatican Council) bringing ‘forth fruit in charity for the life of the world’.

 The book concludes with A Prayer to Jesus of John’s Gospel which gathers together the ten themes that have been the focus (facets) of the study.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Release date: Aug 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788125154

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The study of the Fourth Gospel will for ever be associated in my mind with the figure of Raymond E. Brown. His magisterial two-volume commentary, The Gospel According to John , enabled me to engage with this most exquisite text during my time as a seminarian and student of theology. In a later book, Introduction to the New Testament , Brown pointed out how the style and theology of John’s Gospel are ‘intimately wedded’. At the time of Brown’s death the beginning of a revised version of his commentary was discovered, and this was later published in its rudimentary form.

Subsequently a conference of biblical scholars applauded Brown’s life and work with a series of papers on the major questions about the Gospel of John. Published under the title Life in Abundance, these papers included articles on Brown’s own legacy, the theology and spirituality of John’s writings, the Johannine community, John and Judaism, and Qumran and the Johannine writings. In a tribute to Brown, the editor of that volume, John R. Donahue, used words that could justly describe the author of the gospel itself: ‘You have shown us how to march to a different drummer, and may we constantly hum that melody of the Gospel you unfolded to us – as we plod on toward that life in abundance that is your lasting inheritance’.¹

Alongside the metaphor of melody, the image of a diamond – which I use in the title of this book – can serve to show the interaction of style and spirituality, theology and mission, in the Gospel of John. The themes of this gospel are involved in an incessant interplay of information, illumination and inspiration, just as light, when it falls on a diamond, illuminates different facets of the jewel as it moves in a never-ending circle, radiating and returning, always reprising and renewing. Another writer, John F. O’Grady, having quoted C. K. Barrett’s comment that the process of reading John is ‘a circular one’, points out that ‘in reading this entire Gospel, the reader goes around and around, returning to familiar themes again and again and developing an ever-deepening understanding’.²

With its essential exposition of the eternal Word’s enfleshment and exaltation, John’s Gospel is a drama drenched in light – light that overcomes the darkness. Set as a story interspersed with speeches, its narrative develops more as a spiral than in a linear fashion, inviting the reader to become intimately involved in the unfolding dynamic of ever-deepening discipleship. Irradiated by the light of the Risen Lord, the gospel reveals fundamental features of following Jesus, including the fruits that flow from identity with and imitation of him. These features and fruits form the facets of the divine diamond that is John’s Gospel.

Identifying these facets involves both aesthetic insights and analytical investigations into the text of the gospel itself. In his influential work, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, C. H. Dodd lists the following as leading ideas: Symbolism and Eternal Life, Knowledge of God and Union with God, Truth and Faith, Light, Glory, Judgement, Spirit, Messiah, Son of Man and Son of God, Logos. Many of these elements are explicitly Christological, featuring titles that John shares with the Synoptics, while to some extent surpassing them.

Alongside this theological analysis a spiritual approach might be added, one advanced by the Second Vatican Council in its account of revelation:

It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will, which was that people can draw near to the Father, through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the holy Spirit, and thus become sharers in the divine nature. By this revelation, then, the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men and women as his friends, and lives among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company.³ In these two sentences, there are seven scriptural references, only one of which is to the Gospel of John; nevertheless the tenor of the passage, with its understanding of the Trinitarian revelation as a relational undertaking, is thoroughly Johannine. Love and friendship, indwelling and communion are key stages for this evangelist in the story of theosis, understood as the process whereby people are transformed to become ‘participants in the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4).

This book is a study of John’s Gospel as ‘the Spiritual Gospel’, an appellation that has been attributed to it from the time of the Alexandrian school in the third century. Throughout this study ‘spiritual’ is understood as involving the integration of human existence – both personal and communal – into the invitation and imitation of God’s Incarnate Son. It indicates our intimacy with God, issuing in our identity as children of the Father in the Spirit of holiness. The Holy Spirit plays the pivotal role in promoting a spirituality of participation in the divine life of Trinitarian love. In the perspective of the Fourth Gospel, being with and in Jesus is – to borrow a saying from Luke – the ‘one thing necessary’ (10:42). Believing in Christ, and belonging to him, brings people into the friendship and family of God the Father, and it is this intimacy, through the power of the Spirit, that will bear much fruit in and for the world. This is the spirituality of John’s Gospel. Complementing its theological perspective, a commentary on the spirituality of John might be called The Invitation of the Fourth Gospel.

The selection of themes from the gospel in this book is not intended to be exhaustive. As the symbol of the diamond suggests, there are other angles that could be explored, and it is hoped that the focus on the facets selected here will illuminate and integrate those that are not individually investigated. Indeed, the gospel itself offers the explicit reminder that ‘in my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places’ (14:2). A reader may become fascinated by a particular facet of this gospel, but this will not lead to fixation on it, as the flow from one facet to another is constant, drawing the reader away, again and again, to awareness of the other aspects. Moreover, the gospel itself ends with the caveat that ‘if every one of the other things that Jesus did were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written’ (21:25).

This gospel was written so that its readers, responding to the invitation issued in and by the Incarnate Word, might ‘come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God’, and that through this belief they might ‘have life in his name’ (20:31). Jean Laplace expresses this well: ‘Such is the conclusion of the whole Gospel of John: the faith which opens, through the light, to the life which is love’.⁴ Paul N. Anderson asserts that ‘just as John’s material includes the most elevated and theological presentations of Jesus among the four canonical Gospels, John also is the most mundane and grounded among them’.⁵ It is this richness that explains the constant and never-ending fascination with the Fourth Gospel. It is my hope that the exploration here of some of the facets of this gospel will encourage further excursions around the ever fascinating, divinely created and humanly crafted diamond that is its focus.

Robert Kysar, writing on John’s Gospel, employs an image suggested in the Gospel itself to indicate its integrity and inclusiveness:

Someone has said of the fourth Gospel that if you begin pulling on one of the individual threads of this document, soon you find that it is woven throughout the whole fabric of this document. There is a forward and a backward glance in nearly every individual Johannine periscope; every story and every discourse both build on what has come before and anticipate what is to come … The Gospel of John is like a seamless garment, ‘woven in one piece’ (19:23). In a sense, this is true of all the Gospels, but the weaving may be even tighter in John. This means for us [readers] that the better we know the whole of the Gospel of John, the better we will understand its individual parts.⁶

The corollary is also true: the better we focus on the parts, the fuller will be our knowledge of the whole. Whether understood as the movements that make up a symphony, or as the threads that tie a tapestry together, or as the