The astonishing Fourth Gospel: teasing out the narrative of the one we call John

Fr Henry Wansbrough OSB • April 14, 2024 at 8:30 am

I hesitate to call the Fourth Gospel “John’s Gospel”, since there is no reliable sign that John had anything to do with its authorship. It is the gospel of the Beloved Disciple, but who was he? The Beloved Disciple is never given a name, and that is quite deliberate. He (or perhaps she – except that women were rarely literate in those days) occurs four times in the text.

The expression stands for the unnamed disciple who is closest to Jesus at the Eucharist, the only disciple to share the Cross to the very end, the first to recognise the meaning of the empty tomb and who, in the final chapter, is put forward as the author it y behind the message of the Risen Christ. These four marks touch every Christian: the witness of the Beloved Disciple is the witness of us all.

This is shown in the structure of the gospel. The first three gospels, based on Mark’s account, expanded by Matthew and Luke, are a series of stories about Jesus, usually ending with (or leading up to) a pronouncement about

His identity. In the Fourth Gospel, however, we have a series of lively encounters of Jesus with a widely varied range of individuals, resulting in dialogues by which we learn about both Jesus and His message.

It all starts with the dialogue of Mary with the servants at the marriage feast at Cana: “Do whatever He tells you.” Mary brackets the gospel, for she will next appear at the foot of the Cross – the fulfilment of the “hour” of Jesus, which has not yet arrived at Cana and is eagerly awaited throughout the story.

The first teaching dialogue is with the crusty old Pharisee, Nicodemus. Hesitant and fearful, he eventually makes good at the burial of Jesus. The Samaritan woman is quite different: Jesus teases her, and she returns with her own witticisms and inquisitive probes: “Oh, I see you are a prophet, Sir!”

Different again is the dialogue with Pontius Pilate, the judge who makes a fool of himself by asking “What is truth?” and then redeems himself by insisting that Jesus is truly “King of the Jews”. Perhaps most moving of all is the brief dialogue in the garden, where Mary Magdalene responds in sheer love to the sound of her name called out by the Risen Christ – or is it the lakeside dialogue with Peter, reestablishing himself after his triple betrayal, but hurt at Christ’s triple questioning?

On any level, these dialogues leave in tatters any claim that Christianity is patriarchal: it is the women who bring out Jesus at His most tender and responsive – as with the sisters at Bethany. We get to know many different aspects of Jesus’s personality by His interchange with many different sorts of people.

At the same time, we learn the relationship of Jesus to His Father, which is the true purpose of the Bible and the background of the nobility of the figure of Jesus the Word. From the first “In the beginning…” of the famous Prologue, the Word is placed alongside God the Creator in the splendid majesty of isolation in the first words of the Bible. In the Greek we are told not that the Word “was with God”, but rather that the Word “was towards God”.

“Towards” is much more forceful and dynamic, facing and interactive with God; at the end of the Prologue the Word returns, as He will do at the end of the gospel, into the “bosom” or “embrace” of the Father. The influence of the Prologue runs throughout the gospel, so that in every incident and every dialogue the status of the Word is clear. Nothing makes sense unless the Father stands behind the Son. There is an awesome dignity about the Son which lifts His message.

The great final version of the discourse after the Last Supper (John 17) flips us back to the Prologue: it expresses the relationship of Father and Son by means of an expansion of the Lord’s Prayer, reflecting on the obedience of the Son to the Father and His hallowing of Himself and the name and nature of the Father by doing the will of the Father.

Then we finally see at least some of the meaning of one of these mysterious Johannine ambiguities, “the Son of Man must be lifted up”, as Jesus cries out on the Cross: “It is fulfilled.” What is fulfilled? The promise of scripture? The will of the Father? The purpose of the life of Jesus? This gospel unfolds on many levels; no cursory reading will suffice to yield its full richness.

Photo: ‘The Marriage at Cana’, by Maerten de Vos.

Dom Henry Wansbrough is a monk of Ampleforth Abbey and the general editor of the New Jerusalem Bible.

This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.