Webinar doles out some serious tips for preaching on the fourth gospel

LOUISVILLE — Between Sunday and June 15, the Revised Common Lectionary serves up at least nine passages from the Gospel of John. Who better to deliver the Synod of the Covenant’s online monthly preaching webinar on Wednesday than the Rev. Dr. Karoline M. Lewis, homiletics professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of “John: Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries” and “A Lay Preacher’s Guide: How to Craft a Faithful Sermon.”

Image

“I am a bit passionate about the Gospel of John,” Lewis said once she’d been introduced by the synod’s executive, the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick. “I am delighted to share this with you.” Her presentation is here.

Lewis offered this summary of John’s gospel:

• Where does Jesus come from? This is also where he is going.
• What is his relationship with God like? This is the believer’s relationship, too.
• Who is Jesus? Answer: The “I AM.”

Lewis dates John’s gospel around the same time as Matthew’s and Lukes, 75 or 85 CE. It’s “a gospel that wants to bring in believers,” she said. “It’s apostolic, and it’s written for a community that was likely excommunicated for believing in Jesus.”

Central to John is our relationship with Jesus, she said. “Believing is synonymous with being in relationship with Jesus,” Lewis said. “It’s an active thing, not something you get.”

John 1:1 “is one of the most famous verses in scripture,” she noted, with claims “we’ll keep coming back to over and over.”

“In the beginning” hearkens back to Genesis 1:1 in the Septuagint, and “was the Word” is a claim of Jesus’ origin, part of Creation. “Jesus is coming as the Word to create, to give new birth, to create this relationship with God,” Lewis said. “Relationship is so key with this gospel.”

“The Word was with God,” and the believer is invited into this relationship, which is “absolutely at the heart of why Jesus has come.”

“The Word was God.” There is “no other New Testament book that makes such a profound claim on Jesus’ identity,” Lewis said.

Lewis calls John “Not the Baptist.” “He’s not a messianic figure, but a witness, the testifier,” she said, citing John 1:15. For John, testifying is the key characteristic of a disciple. “We see lots of portraits of John pointing,” Lewis said, displaying one. Those preaching on John’s gospel in the coming weeks can “invite our listeners into a theological image they may not be used to, but it’s present in the text.”

In John 1:14, the Word becomes flesh, and Eugene Peterson’s The Message says the Word “moved into the neighborhood.” The verb is “tent” or “tabernacle,” Lewis said. “It’s a unique word here. John is recalling the wilderness wanderings in the Book of Numbers.” Since the gospel comes out after 70 CE, “the theological crisis is, where is God if the Temple is destroyed and Jerusalem is razed?” God “is tenting in a human body,” she said. Jesus “enters into the fullness of what it means to be human.”

John 1:18 completes John’s Prologue by restating the first verse. In the earliest translations, the word “son” is not found here. Jesus is “the only begotten, the one and only.” Who’s the “beloved” disciple in John’s gospel? Many believe it’s John himself, but Lewis thinks “it’s you and me, the unnamed believer. This is what we’re invited into. We are the disciples whom Jesus loves.”

John “is so different, and that’s one of the challenges in preaching John,” she said. It has different soteriology, Christology and eschatology, “and a different understanding of what the Spirit is. We learn to appreciate its particularities and preach that for all it’s worth.”

One participant asked: what’s the gospel’s relationship with the letters of the same name and the Book of Revelation?

Image

“I change my mind on that every 10 minutes,” Lewis said with a smile. “John scholars are all over the map on this. It seems clear there is some carrying on of a Johnine tradition,” not unlike the Pauline school, “where later letters sound like Paul but aren’t Paul. That’s where I land on that. I stay in John and preach what’s in front of me rather than explaining John from the letters or from Revelation.”

The Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well shares the longest conversation with Jesus recorded in the gospels. “It takes 26 verses for Jesus to get to, ‘I’m thirsty, give me a drink and I’m God,’” Lewis said. The details of the this story and others make for interesting preaching. Lewis displayed a Chris Cook painting of the woman at the well in which the painter “drops down to the detail” of the water jar she leaves behind. “What does she leave behind at the well?” It could be her shame and blame, Lewis said. “She now becomes a witness for Jesus. She is walking in the light. She is free.”

“A detail can be a sermon unto itself, like leaving a jar of water behind,” Lewis said. “Why would Jesus pick me, and yet Jesus finds this woman at the well.”

Jesus’ first sign — it’s not a miracle in John’s gospel — is the wedding at Cana. In Matthew, it’s the Sermon on the Mount. In John, the sign is “the amount — 20-30 gallons filled to the brim, the best wine when you least expect it,” Lewis said. “It’s not called a miracle. It’s a sign. Signs point to the abundance of grace found in Jesus.”

The well-known and well-loved John 3:16 is tied to John 10:16, where Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also.” That’s why Jesus brings the disciples through Samaria. “It was necessary to show the disciples what the world looks like,” Lewis said. “It looks like the woman at the well.”

Some people find anti-Semitism in John 7 and 8, where Jesus “is in strong polemic with fellow religious leaders.”

“Jesus is a loyal obedient male Jew who goes to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage festivals,” Lewis said. She urged preachers to consider changing translations from saying “the Jews” to “Jewish authorities,” because “Jesus was a Jew. His community is Jewish. The rift is between Jesus and his fellow authorities.”

The raising of Lazarus is “the impetus for Jesus’ arrest in John,” Lewis said. The high priestly prayer he offers “is unique to John” in that Jesus doesn’t go away to pray. The disciples “hear every word,” Lewis said.

The arrest in the garden also has unique features. There’s no kiss from Judas. For John, “betrayal is leaving the relationship. Judas had already betrayed Jesus.” Only in John is Jesus crucified, buried and makes his first resurrection appearance in the garden, “going back to the beginning,” Lewis pointed out.

In John, Jesus gives the disciples the Holy Spirit behind locked doors. The NRSV has it “he breathed on them,” but it’s really “he breathed into them” in the same way God does to the human being.

“The presence of the Holy Spirit,” Lewis said, “enables the disciples to do the ministry Jesus is sending them to do.”

Learn more about the Synod of the Covenant’s monthly series of preaching webinars here.