A Couple Of Biblical Texts In Context

I would like to think that it is a sign of maturing in faith and not just aging into crankiness that some of my favorite passages in the Bible have begun to trouble me as much as they comfort me. Two examples, both from my very favorite Gospel, should suffice to illustrate at least some of my --- and, I believe, our --- troubles. Since modern translations do not help very much to alleviate the difficulties, I will quote both passages in familiar King James language.

The first is John 3:16 --- “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.“ What is comforting and relevant about this verse is its picture of the scope of God’s love. Although the world of which it speaks is smaller than the world to which today’s astrophysical and ecological interests and passions stretch, it is still large enough to encompass the whole of the human world that St. Paul once characterized as groaning in travail, awaiting relief and release. (Romans 8:21-3) God’s love is for all, not some. It is not the limited, conditional love of one among many tribal deities, but the pure, unbounded love of the one and only Lord of all Life.

Well, not quite. As the Lord giveth in the first part of this verse, he taketh away in the second. All who are not “in” the Son (the mysticism here is an important theme running through the whole of this Gospel) will be cut off from the source and scene of eternal life. If we were Jewish Christians in the late first century of the second milennium, just kicked out of the synagogue for insisting that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah, we might want to take this verse to heart, give up our longing for an irretrievably lost fellowship with our still Jewish friends and family members, and rev up our participation in the Christian koinonia. But we are not of that time and situation. We are Christians in an increasingly interdependent and religiously pluralistic world of a new millennium altogether, who can no longer afford to allow the good news of John 3:16a to be swallowed up by the very bad and irrelevant news of 3:16b.

The second passage of this little exercise is John 14:6 --- “…I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Here, too, there is something comforting and relevant to be gleaned. At least, I have found it so ever since I began struggling in late adolescence with how to be a faithful Christian in addition to being a new church member. I got what God was all about; what I did not get was how to translate my understanding of God into a better way of personal living than I had managed to come up with on my own. The Ten Commandments helped some, although the jealous God of whom they spoke was not the God I had come to know. “Look to Jesus,” a lot of my friends kept telling me. And that helped more.

It was the first part of John 14:6 that first showed me what I would find by looking in earnest, even though the exclusivity implied by the “The” of the passage seemed more than just a little extreme. As for the second part of the verse, I could only close my eyes and shake my head in consternation. Jesus had become worth listening to not because I saw him as my only path to God, but because the God who had already come to me along his own path was the same God who came to Jesus too, much more powerfully.

Every now and then, I get to wondering about just what might befall us in the life of faith were the original manuscripts of biblical books ever to turn up somewhere. At present and for the most part at least, we have every reason to suppose that they were copied accurately and faithfully. But… One speculation I have is that in that Johannine School of editors back yonder, there might have been a dyslexic guy who inadvertently reversed the original phrasing of 14:6b and whose reversal got picked up and incorporated into all the versions of the Fourth Gospel that subsequently made it out of the School. Consider this possibility for the original statement: “no man cometh unto me, but by the Father.”

Or unto the Buddha, or to Muhammad, or… As speculation, of course, this line of thought is clearly over the top. As theology, though? Now that is another story.