Wednesday, 5/15/13
Our Gospel today comes from the end of Chapter seventeen in
John’s Gospel, and it offers me the chance to say something about how St. John
structured his Gospel. Now, the structure of a writing is not a thing any of us
worry about, but I learned its importance in a television interview last week.
A man named Simon Winchester composed
an epic about the Atlantic Ocean. His immense volume recalled historical event
from all the countries washed by the waters of the Atlantic. The C-Span host
asked Simon how he went about writing a book, and he said there were three
elements to it. First, you have to come up with an interesting topic, secondly,
you must structure your material. The third part, the actual writing, is the easiest
part of it.
For the first part of writing his Gospel John’s topic was
that Jesus on the spiritual level leads us to the Promised Land just as the
Father did it physically for the Israelites.
John, in structuring his Gospel, took the Father’s principal
interventions in the books of the Torah, then, in similar places he fitted in
dramatic actions by which Jesus echoed each of those highlights. Let’s look at
some of them.
1. In Exodus Forty the Father wanted his own tent, and when
it erected it glowed with his glory. In John 1:14 we read “He set up his tent with us, and we saw is glory that was like the glory
of an only Son.
2. Leviticus Nine described the Fiery cloud that led the
people through the darkness. John, in Chapter Eight quoted Jesus as saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows
me will not walk in darkness.
3. In Exodus 16:15 the people discovered the manna, and
Moses said, “This is the bread which the
Lord has given you to eat.” In John 6:18 John quoted Jesus as saying, “It was not Moses who gives real bread from
heaven,” then, “I am the bread of
life.”
In a like manner, John showed how Jesus echoed other events
of the Exodus, where each tribe inherited its own land across the Jordan. In
John’s Gospel Jesus said there was a dwelling place for everyone.
This paralleling Johns Gospel with the Exodus story can be
seen from the Gospels in the Masses this last month. They are all from the
final fourth of John’s Gospel, and they echo the Book of Deuteronomy, the final
fourth of the Torah. In them Jesus has summarized the lessons from the first
twelve chapters of John’s Gospel, jut as Deuteronomy summarized the lessons of
the Torah.
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