John’s Gospel presents its readers with a radical view of reality. The author challenges his readers to move beyond the mundane. He presents the same basic story as do the synoptic writers (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), but he omits much of what they include and focuses upon what they merely mention. He seems less involved with telling a story than the other Gospel writers and more involved with presenting a philosophy of life.

John’s Gospel raises the most vital questions regarding reality. What is life? What is truth? What is love? What does it mean to keep the commandments? The answer to those questions, for John, lies in the person of Jesus, and the answer to any one of those questions is the answer to all of them.

The writer begins his Gospel not with a story, but with an affirmation by which he identifies Jesus as the logos, the very principle of reality.1 He proceeds to include stories and sayings of Jesus that elaborate this affirmation. The call of John to believe in Christ is more than just the call to believe in a person, it is the call to embrace life in its fullness in a way radically different from how we ordinarily suppose we should ("In him was life and that life was the light of men" [1:4]).

Although John affirms that in the logos is life and the light (the truth), he also recognizes that the world did not recognize Jesus (1:10). Yet John notes that "to all who received him … he gave the right to become children of God" (1:12). This marks the challenge of John, the challenge to embrace an ideal of reality that exceeds the ordinary.

In the megalomaniac culture of ancient Rome, Jesus challenged ideals of greatness by washing the feet of his followers—including the one who would betray him. This lies at the heart of the most significant question in John, the question of love.

The memory verse this week, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lays down his life for his friends" (John 15:13), appears as part of the passion narrative in John in which Jesus not only predicts his passion but also explains it. The narrative focuses on the truth as the means to freedom (8:32) and identifies it with the Holy Spirit, the comforter that God will send (14:15, 15:26, 16:13).

In John 14:17 and 26, Jesus identifies this "truth" as the other comforter that will come in his absence—"the Spirit of truth." The narrative continues to explain that this truth is manifested in the disciples’ love for each other (see 14:15ff). Jesus then presents his own impending assassination as the example of the extent to which his followers should love (15:18–20).

In John’s Gospel, Jesus uses the word friends to describe his relationship with his followers. In John 15:14, he says "you are my friends if you do what I command." Thus, when he speaks of "friends" he speaks of the community of believers. What does Jesus command? Does he command that his disciples carefully heed the Ten Commandments, including the fourth? This is a question to ponder, but not in the context of the passion narrative of John.

What Jesus commands here is the very thing that makes him lay down his life for those who keep his commands. Jesus commands that his followers love one another. "My command is this: love each other as I have loved you" (15:12).

It is easy for us to read the idea of Jesus laying down his life for his friends with the assumption of the various theories of the atonement with which we are acquainted. However, it is important here that we put those aside and look within John’s Gospel for the reason Jesus went to the cross. Certainly in John’s Gospel Jesus is "the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (1:29); that is the meaning of the cross in John.

But when we get to the passion narrative we read that Jesus went to the cross because the world hated him (15:18). Who is the world here? In the context of all that we read in John, the world is the religious establishment, not necessarily the "outsiders" (18:1–19:42). In John’s Gospel (as in the Synoptic Gospels), Jesus’ conflict is with "his own" (1:11). He went to the cross because he challenged the superficial ideals of the established religion (see 7:14–24). Jesus was hated because he "had done among them what no one else did" (15:24).

In his first epistle John elaborates on the reason for hatred among believers by explaining that Cain killed his brother Abel because his works were evil and his brother’s just (1 John 3:12). Thus, the supreme love to which Jesus points is a love that he challenges his followers to have for each other as well. The narrative is directed to the community of believers. The immediate concern is that the vicious cycle of religious violence be broken.

We may get a fuller and broader definition of this love when we also read John’s first epistle, particularly chapters 3 and 4. Here John explains love as the image of God in the believer. Thus he says, "No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us" (1 John 4:12). This for John indicates that the believer has entered into life (3:14).

We see then that John does not present the atonement as something that in and of itself brings life. Rather, he challenges the individual to demonstrate the same love that Jesus demonstrated in order to enter into life (1 John 3:14). He challenges the followers of Jesus to lay down their lives as Jesus laid down his own. He challenges the followers of Christ to walk as Christ walked, to talk as Christ talked, to love as Christ loves.

In the passion narrative of John’s Gospel Jesus indicates that this kind of love is without regard to live up to the expectations of the establishment—the world (see 15:18ff). In light of all this, John 3:16 ("… whoever believes …") is not so much a call to affirm the Christological creed as it is a call to take up the cross and follow Jesus of Nazareth. It is a call to risk social stigmatization, institutional suspicion, and personal comforts for what really matters—life as it is demonstrated in the self-giving love of Jesus.

The message of John is that there is no greater love than this, and this is the key to freedom—the way to life.

Questions

1. Is it possible for any organized Christian group to demonstrate the kind of love that Jesus requires of his followers?
   
2. Does the world hate the followers of Jesus today in the same way and for the same reasons it hated Christ? What is the implication of your answer in regard to the state of Jesus’ followers today?
   
3. How do your beliefs and practices allow you to be—or prevent you—from being a friend of Jesus?
   
4. In the context of John, in what ways may you lay down your life for your friends? Does this make discipleship too hard? Is this really necessary?

1. Logos in John carries with it an eclecticism of Greek and Hebrew thought that the English rendering word does not capture. In Greek (particularly Stoic) philosophy the term was used to describe the force that structured the universe. The Jewish philosopher Philo combined this image with Jewish conceptions of personified Wisdom through which God created all things. Thus the logos in John is this pre-existent principle of being, the Wisdom of God, the essence of reality, whom he identifies as Christ incarnate.

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