Time and place...

I disremember ever living in a place with fog.  When I was younger, we lived in Houston,which is sticky and hot nearly 12 months of the year.  So, perhaps, I did live with fog.  But, here, I am living with fog.  And I love it.

When fog comes, I always think it magical.  I mean, I think of fog rolling in off a body of water.  I'm landlocked.  It is infrequent enough that I am always caught off guard when I walk outside and discover the fog has come again.

The other night, when I was taking Amos out, it was foggy.  After he was finished, I got the bright idea of going on up to the airing porch.  Being there was magical.  It was as if we were standing in a cloud.

The fog obscured so much of the neighborhood around us.  And yet above was a clear night sky.  I unfolded the steamer lounger and settled down with Amos to bask in the wonder.

Truly, I love living in a place with fog.

And a fire place.

Late Friday night, I laid my final fire for the season.  It was 36 degrees outside and ripe for saying goodbye to my fiery comfort.   I thought I would make my final fire movie of the season, too.  And share it.


Long into the night, I roasted myself and dipped my toes into Michael Card's commentary on the Gospel of John.  I am a wimpy toe-dipper.  But I have savored the things that I learned about John.

Because of all the other commentaries, I have a greater appreciation for the two-fold introductions Michael Card crafts.  The first part is about the writer himself.  The second part is a discussion of the themes the reader will encounter.

To remind you again, John was the first commentary Micheal Card wrote, even though I am reading it last.  So, I read for the first time the reason why he started his pursuit of this study ... and I admire him all the more for it.  Too, I think the commentary has the most unrehearsed and so richest explanation of his approach to the informed imagination process of reading the Gospels.  And, clearly because this was the first commentary, Michael Card explains why he began the task of writing the commentaries.  Or, rather, why he changed his approach to studying the Bible.

"On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice,

 'If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink...'" John 7:37 NIV

At first it seems simple enough.  Jesus is in Jerusalem for some sort of feast and is announcing to the crowd that they if they come to him, he will somehow satisfy their thirst.  A bit vague ... It is the stuff of a nice devotional.  That is how I read John 7:37 specifically and the Bible in general before someone helped me to learn to engage and really listen.  If any single verse is responsible for opening the door of my imagination to engage with the Scripture, it is this verse.


I can just see that devotional:  What did Jesus mean that folk could come to Him and drink?  What does this verse mean to you?  How does Jesus satisfy your own thirst?  How might you satisfy the thirst of others?  UGH.


On a hot summer morning on the third floor of Cherry Hall at Western Kentucky University, William Lane opened that door by asking a few simple questions.

"What Feast?" he asked.

None of us knew.

"Look back at verse 2," he said.

Verse 2 of chapter 7 says the feast was Tabernacles, also known as Succoth, or sometimes Booths.

"Does anyone know what occurs on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles?"

Another long uncomfortable silence...

With an intensity we were slowly becoming accustomed to, Dr. Lane began to quote (from memory) an obscure passage from the Mishnah, the collected teachings of the rabbis between 200 B.C. to A.D. 200.  From a section called Sukkah (4:1, 9-10) he explained that on the last and greatest day of the Feast of Tabernacles the high priest would lead a procession to the pool of Siloam.  Before the congregation he would dip a pitcher into the pool.  The crowd would return to the temple, chanting psalms like 118:25, "Save now, we beseech thee, O Jehovah" (ASV).  When the crowd arrived again at the temple, the high priest would raise the pitcher high and put its contents on the ground.  This commemorated Moses striking the rock in the wilderness and the provision of water for the people of God.  At this moment, he would proclaim, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation," a passage from the prophet Isaiah (12:3 ESV).

"Now take that information and return to the passage," Bill said.

It is difficult to find the words to describe the difference reading John 7:37 with that background.  This was the first time I had ever read the Bible with an informed imagination.  The words on the page that a moment ago were a dry devotion became a motion picture in full color.  I put two and two together and saw Jesus standing in the midst of that crowd, perhaps somewhere in the back.  As the words of the high priest died out, a voice, a shouting voice, from the back of the crowd cries out, "If anyone is thirsty, he should come to me and drink."


Time and place changes things, doesn't it?  It does for me.  It has.  Reading Michael Card's commentaries where culture, politics, religion, and historical setting is woven in with word translations, comparisons amongst the Gospel, other Scripture, and relationships between people has been a gift beyond measure.  Were it up to me, his commentaries would be the standard for Bible studies and youth lessons and Sunday School classes.  I sure do wish either he or someone else would write like commentaries on the rest of the New Testament.


The thought of it still takes my breath away over thirty years later.  If that is what engaging with the Scripture is like, I decided then and there that I would give the rest of my life to doing just that, delving deeper into the Bible to find the backgrounds that make the stories come to life.

"We must engage the Scripture at the level of the informed imagination," Bill said too many times to count.  And many of the elements of that approach are evident in this story.  First, we stopped and asked a few simple questions of the text, simple, yet better than we had thought to ask.  John says it was the last day of the feast, trusting that we have been listening, assuming that we have read large blocks of his Gospel and not simply one or two verses. Thirty-five verses earlier he told us it was Tabernacles.  He assumes we were listening.  But I had not been paying attention.

Next we did our homework, or Bill did our homework for us.  Again it led to one of those better questions, "What happens on the last and greatest day of the Feast of Tabernacles?"

It is always the informed imagination.  We must become committed to doing the work, to finding the best sources, beginning with primary sources, the earliest writings: Mishnah, Talmud, Josephus, Pliny, Seutonius an Tacitus.  These ancient sources do not exist only for the scholars.  They are all readily available, now more than ever with electronic books. (Many of them are free!)  When we returned to the text with an informed imagination we were ready to engage, and what happened changed our lives, changed everything.  The facts in the mind combined with the devotion of the heart, across the bridge of the imagination, all under the guidance and control of the Spirit and the Word came to life!  You and I are there with the crowd in the fall air. (Tabernacles is a fall festival celebrating the harvest.)  Our legs are sore since we've just climbed the steep hill from the pool of Siloam, at the bottom of the ridge, to the temple which dominates the top of the hill.  At the moment we are thirsty, thirsty and out of breath.  We hear an ordinary voice shouting those luminous words from the back of the mob.  How do we respond?  To find him, to see his face, to fall down confessing our thirst, our sin, our need, our hunger for him?  Once you experience this sort of engagement with Scripture nothing will ever be the same.


Amen to that last sentence!

Having read through Mark, Matthew, and Luke, I thought I had a good idea of the answers to some of those questions, but reading the rest of the introduction to the commentary of John, I realized (anew) that I still needed to learn why John might have included that passage and how he choose to write it.  Time and place times two.

I learned that John was aged when he penned it.  He had years and years and years of experience sharing the Good News, guided by the Holy Spirit in learning how to shape words best to fit the ears of his audience.

He was (mostly likely) a pastor with a formed theology of "high Christology."  For John, Jesus is light and life, and the One through whom God created the universe.  Yet he had heard Jesus' voice, had seen his luminous face, had even touched his hand.  His passion and beliefs are woven throughout his testimony and expounded in his own sermon bits incorporated into it.

He was writing from Ephesus, which informs his testimony for his first readers just as Mark writing from Rome after the great fire did his own testimony and Matthew from Jerusalem.  Ephesus was a temple city, just like Jerusalem.  But it was a temple city centered around the worship of Artemis.  Her temple was four times the size of the Parthenon.  Her cult thrived in Ephesus and the city's economy was centered around that activity.  To the Jews living there, in that time and place, John penned his testimony of Jesus Christ, carefully crafting his letter so that they might understand the differences between the worship that filled their city and the worship of the One who was the Way and the Truth and the Life for all.

So much.  So much is in the introduction that I never knew ... John the man, his being an eyewitness, the time and place of his letter, his theology, and the themes in his testimony.  Just as the other writers have, John has identifiable patterns and bits that are unique to him.  I think I could write at least three more blog posts just about introduction alone.  Not, mind you, does learning all that lessen my fear of encountering some of those scary passages to me, but I suppose you could say that the introduction gave me a bit of hope.

You really have to read the commentaries yourself to understand. In this case, you have to read the introduction.  But I will try to make one point clear:  The title Michael Card gave his commentary, John: the Gospel of Wisdom, is one that you think you understand at first glance but don't.

Whereas Mark, Matthew, and Luke quote heavily from the Law (the first five books of the Bible) and the Prophets, 70 and 74 times respectively, amongst their three testimonies, John quotes from the Wisdom books.  He quotes or alludes to the Wisdom writings 27 times. Yet wisdom is not the be-all, end-all that it is cracked up to be.  It wasn't even in the Bible.  Job clearly shows the inadequacy of wisdom (his and that of his friends).  When God came to him, He didn't provide all the answers; He asked more questions!  It was His presence that was the answer.  Such is the same in so very many of the psalms, especially those of lament.  Ecclesiastes, penned by the wisest man who ever lived, laments the vanity of wisdom.  The Song of Solomon is not even about wisdom.  And, even though Proverbs is a wealth of practical wisdom and beautiful personifications of wisdom, none of the Gospel writers ever refer to Proverbs.  In sum, the pursuit of wisdom oft leaves one in disappointment and despair ... until God shows up.  God is the answer, not wisdom!

Jesus is not the merely the wisdom of God; He is the answer.  Only in John does Jesus present Himself as such with the I AM sayings.  Yet He is constantly misunderstood.  John takes his readers through Jesus' journey in Jerusalem, surrounded by those who cannot comprehend who He is or what He is teaching, becoming increasingly lonely until He is alone on the cross.

John isn't about giving answers, but about presenting the present God.  John understands both being confused and being misunderstood.  John understand loneliness.  And John understands the need for bold confession and precise words, even when surrounded by great pressure to think and believe as the world does (or as your city/region/country does).  So he uses as many as 59 parenthetical asides that give translations, background information, eyewitness details, or "the missing piece of the puzzle that he has com to recognize after having told the story a thousand times."

Michael Card writes that John's "Gospel is more a living monolog than a written story."

Reading the introduction, I began to wonder if John might provide the intimacy of having traveled, eaten, and slept beside Jesus, the passion and wonder of a lifetime savoring such, that would balance the distance of Luke's Gospel.  I mean, Luke is full of concern for the outcast and disenfranchised, those who discomfort and bother the status quo, but it is a Gospel collected and collated, not one breathed by walking side-by-side with Christ.  Mark is so passionate, almost screaming: JESUS THE SON OF MAN, THE SON OF GOD.   Jesus on a mission.  Matthew presents a new identity for the Christian Jews who were losing theirs in the cataclysmic upheaval and radical shift that was a religion of being cleansed and forgiven by sacrifices changing to a religion of salvation through the works righteousness of meticulously keeping and upholding the Law.  Luke shows us how amazed and astounded folk were—from Jesus' family to His disciples to His listeners to the religious leadership to politicians.  His testimony of multiple eye-witnesses ... confirms ... in a way that of Mark and Matthew, but from yet a third viewpoint of who Jesus was/is.

John, well, he was old.  He had lived with Jesus and lived after Jesus.  Long, long after Jesus.  In fact, you could say that John lived two lifetimes of faith, given the average lifespan of his time.  And he found himself in another temple city where the worship of people was the driving force of life, rather than The Giver of Life Himself.  So, knowing John's time and place better, now, and knowing how carefully Michael Card presents his commentary, perhaps there is less to fear in John than I think.

I repeat ... I have been ineffably blessed by reading these commentaries on the Gospels.


I thought I would finish with one single thought from John Chapter 1, verse 17: "...for the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."

Jesus is full of grace and truth, but not truth as anyone in the history of humankind has ever known.  Not truth as a right answer or truth as the correct words, but truth as a person—living, breathing and eventually bleeding and dying.  Truth that one comes to know personally in the context of a life, not between the pages of a textbook.  From this moment on, knowing the truth will not necessarily mean being right but rather being faithful.  Knowing the truth will no longer mean knowing the answers but only knowing Jesus Christ.


"Knowing the truth will no longer mean knowing the answers but only knowing Jesus Christ."  

Dipping my toe in that thought provides a shade of insight to Jesus claim that His yoke is easy and His burden light.  "What shall I do?" we all ask, just as the rich young ruler did.  We expect (and some of us even want) a different, doable answer than the one Jesus came to speak:  "Nothing.  I will do/have done it all."

"Knowing the truth will no longer mean knowing the answers but only knowing Jesus Christ." 

Man!  Does that ever change the way I think about Philippians 4:8!

"Knowing the truth will no longer mean knowing the answers but only knowing Jesus Christ."

The best "devotionals" ever written to help one know Jesus Christ?  That's easy:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Getting to know the Living Word through reading the Word because the Holy Spirit works through the Word (and Sacrament) to give and sustain faith, grant forgiveness and give repentance, and bind up and heal our spiritual wounds and sicknesses.