Pastor John. Brian N. Tebbutt

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СКАЧАТЬ abiding, believing. He was representing the truth we were looking for. It was fresh. I was hooked on St. John. Here, text and human personality and faith could run together. These talks were a foundation for his later book in 1985, Water into Wine: An Introduction to John’s Gospel. I thank him for the beginning!

      I was inspired to start preaching seriously on St. John’s Gospel! I began my long series in January 1977. There are now more than fifty sermons in it and it is still being added to over forty years later! There is no point at which the text is exhausted. It renews itself and me all the time. I have hopes for its effects on the hearers. The main thrust was to make it come alive in a fresh way for my congregations.

      This was meant to happen in two ways. I tried, and am still trying, to relate the content of the message about Christ to personal life. The conviction (and the experience for self and others) is that all that is within us, our interior being, must hear the Gospel. Sadly, so many sermons do not speak to what is actually happening inside us, or in our lives. It is meant to happen for us by allowing a fresh response to the text, free of some of the old traditional issues. The question is, for instance, not so much “Did it happen?” or “What does it (objectively) mean?” as “What is the impact of this narrative on me and how does it touch me?” Later, when the language developed, I discovered this approach was called narrative and reader-response criticism!

Then in 1980 my daughter started her A Level religious education course on St. John’s Gospel! As we swapped testing quotes and questions across the family table, I learnt by heart, for the first time, the content of every chapter and the sequence of every episode and discourse. That was in my development a huge step forward. It is always hard to remember what is in the Gospels, in which one, and in which place! My appreciation grew of the sheer brilliance of the Gospel we have to which we give the name John. The long journey started in earnest to understand how it came to be and what it was saying and how it was saying it, and what it means to us now. That fascination remains. It “remains enigmatic and fascinating.”2

      2. Reading John

      2a. Some Parameters I Am Using

Some parameters need to be made clear. I am using “John” for the end product, and also for the writer whose writing has notionally completed itself in the final product we now work with. We must, we can, “let John be John.” The narrative-critical approach burst on the scene from literary theory with Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design in 1983. The dominance of historical-critical scholarship gave way to a style of looking at texts as literature, “that is as forms of communication that affect those who receive or experience them . . . narrative criticism treats these same texts as mirrors that invite audience participation in the creation of meaning . . . texts shape the way readers understand themselves and their own present circumstances.”3 We are in touch with “The world barely in front of the text.”4 The text’s purpose is to lead “readers to ‘see’ the world as the evangelist sees it . . .” and it “is therefore a mirror in which readers can ‘see’ the world in which they live.”5 We may be looking back on the life of Jesus, but as with all factual and fictional historical reading, we enter the historical world as though we are contemporaries.

      A church member said, “I love Jane Austen. I read it and I become part of the story.” The implication is that it becomes part of me because I feel and behave differently; I am moulded, stirred, and affected (affect) by the story.

      There are tools of the trade:

       the implied author, the perspective from which the work appears to have been written;

       the point of view;

       the implied reader, the expectations we have of the effect the text has on the readers who seem to be the target;

       the plot, the aim of conveying a meaning in the events;

       characters, who appear to be historical yet are intended to convey a message;

       style, which contains, for instance, repeated themes, symbolism, double meanings, or irony.

Narrative criticism does not displace historical criticism. John Ashton, who is very wary of the former, can still say, “There is no obvious reason why the two approaches should not be combined.”6

Taking the language at face value is not exhaustive; there is always more to its significance than meets the eye. Sometimes in John it can be said “the language does not quite surface.”7 Wolfgang Iser in The Reader Process asserts, “the ‘unwritten’ part of a text stimulates the reader’s creative participation,” and quotes Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen: “She stimulates us to supply what is not there.”8 We need “a state of readiness for catching similarities.”9 “The continuous implicit communication within the Fourth Gospel is a major source of both its power and its mystery. What seems clear and simple on the surface is never so simple for the perceptive reader because of the opacity and complexity of the gospel’s sub-surface signals.”10 These tools (reader-response and psychodynamic approach) help as a means of assessing the text, and of accessing the impact of the text on the reader. The writer draws us into a world “created from materials drawn from life and history as well as imagination and reflection. The narrator speaks retrospectively, telling a story that is a sublime blend of historical tradition and faith.”11 “[O]ne of John’s most remarkable traits: the unique artistry with which it controls multiple layers of symbolic or associative significance.”12

      2b. John’s Purpose: What Was It?

      What was the purpose of John’s writing? Many answers have been given to that question. In the short 125-page introduction by Gerard Sloyan, What Are They Saying About John?, there are seventeen different references to the purpose of the Gospel, each with a legitimate slant! The approach in this work is that it was “pastoral.” This is a pastoral gospel, or the Pastoral Gospel. What I mean by that is that it deals with, to put it crudely, what goes on inside people and groups. In particular it answers the cry, “How does Jesus Christ come to me? How does he get inside me?” Or better, “How does he give himself to me?” At the very start of faith and continuing all through in the faith, I want to know, how does he give himself to me? This surely is the simplest expectation of those drawing near, and hearing talk or reading of the “presence” of Christ in us, abiding with us, living with us, giving his life to us, giving his life for us. What does it all mean in experience? When I read in earlier writings about union with Jesus, how does it happen? How did Jesus give himself to them, the first Christians? How does he give himself to us?

The Gospel answers that pastoral-theological question through the way John tells the story. The relationship of Jesus, and of the message to individuals and to the group and to the Johannine community, is preeminent. “Only the narrative mode through which a theological claim is made . . . throughout, shows the glory of God revealed in the person of Jesus,”13 and connects him to ourselves and enables a response to be made to him. The Gospel clearly is both individually and corporately focused; it responds to the community needs at the time or times of writing, and thus can be perceived as dealing with the group process, and at the same time the experience of the individual is also preferred, as the range of individual profiles makes clear. So my focus, whilst, I hope, not doing injustice to the vast wealth of Johannine scholarship, is on the pastoral impact by utilizing instincts and much experience about personality and pastoral care. “Only when the FG is used as a mirror held up to readers’ lives, as the narrator intended, can there be interaction with the glory of Jesus it discloses.”14 It is literature, it is history and art, truth and “fiction,” “all reconciled in the evangelist’s deft performance. If these are reconciled in the hearers’ lives and with their lives, John can speak to them.”15

In the simplest terms, John indicates his own purpose in writing: “that you may believe, continue in believing” (present subjunctive) (John 20:31). СКАЧАТЬ