I’ve been hanging out for awhile in John’s gospel, reading it alongside some friends. I’ve always loved this gospel because of it’s intimacy. I love how John refers to himself: the disciple whom Jesus loved.
In the other gospels we see a more detailed picture. John was a fisherman who worked alongside his brother and on a team with Peter and Andrew. Jesus referred to him and James as the “sons of thunder.” He was a part of what people call the “inner three” who along with Peter and James were privy to some of Jesus’ greatest and most difficult moments, like the transfiguration, the healing of Jairus’ daughter and his anguish in the garden.
We are also privy to some slightly les flattering moments. He angrily wanted to call down fire from heaven to smite people who had refused to welcome Jesus in their Samaritan village. He complained to Jesus when some outsiders were casting out demons in Jesus’ name. He and James vied for special seats in heaven to the left and right of Jesus’ thrown.
But although we get a glimpse of an eager, easily-angered, perhaps power-hungry or at least positionally-striving disciple who let his special friendship with Jesus perhaps go to his head a little, we get none of that in his Gospel. We hear only of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and he never even mentions his actual name.
And this is precisely what inspires me about my kindred spirit John.
I believe that time with Jesus began to form and inform him, that the resurrection was a turning point and that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost revolutionized his life because all of the sudden so much made sense. It always boggles my mind to think of all the things the early believers of Jesus had to figure out along the way with the help of the Holy Spirit.
If the John I described above, from the other gospel accounts is more like the before picture, John’s gospel and his letters are the after picture. What I see is a man who encountered the love of Christ in such a profound way that it completely rewrote his identity and priorities. I see a man that took Jesus at his word when we talked about abiding and experiencing union with God. I see a man who came to understand all who Jesus said He was and discovered what that made him. I see a man who came to realize his identity, not as James’ brother, Peter’s friend, right or left-hand man, inner circle-dweller or one of the powerful elite, but simply as the one whom Jesus loved.
May our false identities have the same encounter with Jesus, I am, the Bread of Life, the Water of Life, the Gate, the Great Shepherd, that John had and may we all come to know ourselves, first and foremost as the one Jesus loves.