Selections from the gospel according to John are used in the year of Mark because there is space, Mark's gospel being shorter than Matthew's and Luke's. It has also been suggested that John's gospel is not a re-telling of the story, but a reflection or meditation on the story. The author freely re-arranges the order of things, and creates episodes not found in the basic story, as constructs on which to hang explanations and investigations of the deeper meanings.

I like to think of John's gospel as a presentation of the New Creation/New Covenant set against the backdrop of the Jewish story as in the Torah. The opening words are the same as the opening words of the Bible in the book of Genesis: "In the beginning..." What follows sets out the new creation. I imagine a video presentation of the words and images of John's gospel in sharp focus against a soft background portraying the story of creation and the garden from the first chapters of Genesis. I think it could be done to great effect. 

(Not only does John open with the Genesis words 'In the beginning', but in the course of chapter one three times there is a 'next day' - which makes four in all, while the Cana episode is introduced as 'on the third day', making a total of seven. We are left to wonder why the days are counted unless it is a reference to the seven days mentioned in the book of Genesis.)

John's gospel does not hold to a sequential timeIine. With the wedding at Cana the background changes to portray the Abraham story. The Covenant is sealed, not in the blood of Isaac, but in the blood of an animal, for blood was necessary in those early cultures to make a promise real. The New Covenant is of another order: it is a marriage party in which clans celebrate their new bond of union with fertility rites and making merry together. Later both John and Jesus will declare that Jesus is like the bridegroom. At Cana, as the accidental guest, he provides the wine that is needed to make a party joyful, and what's more, he provides a massive over-supply.

Suddenly he is in Jerusalem and the Passover theme is introduced. The background now is the story of King David wanting to build a temple and the prophet Nathan saying No: God would be the builder and he will make you a 'House'. Solomon does build the temple, and the detailed narrative tells a story much to the glory of Solomon, which is the way of all institutional building. And yet god does come to dwell in the temple he did not want and does not need, perhaps because it is not yet time for humankind to live without their institutions and their symbols. 

When Jesus walks into the temple he is confronted by corruption, for corruption is inevitable in every human institution. 

In placing this confrontation at the very start of the gospel, John makes it the key to the mission of Jesus.  He has Jesus lay his cards on the table from the outset. One commentator will say that "the destruction of the Temple, that is, the end of the Jewish dispensation and its worship, is the ultimate purpose of Jesus' whole ministry."  

If this is so, the question remains: did Jesus intend a new institution to be formed with a new priesthood and new temples, along with the inevitable corruption not only of the ideal but of the human beings who become enmeshed in the system like flies in a spider's web? Or did he hope that in time the only temple would be his living 'body', the community of those who believe in his name and listen in their hearts to his word of wisdom and love.

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My purpose in sharing these ideas is to offer some idea of how we can get into John's gospel. Everything is myth and symbol. Rather than being another record of what happened, this new approach gives access to the meaning of the Jesus event. Even the short linking paragraphs are guides rather than historical records.

For example, John says that after Cana Jesus and the disciples went to Capernaum, but did not stay long there. Well, we know that in fact they did stay in Galilee for months or years. Mark presents the story as a slow and deliberate advance towards Jerusalem, with authority figures from the temple appearing from time to time to question Jesus. The confrontation in the temple occurred in the final week when Jesus went to Jerusalem for the last time. In saying that they stayed in Capernaum 'only a few days' John's purpose is not to correct the historical account but to point out that from the start the main game was focussed on Jerusalem. It is  almost as if he is telling us not spend too much time on the events in Galilee.

The mystery unfolding is set within the wide panorama of history, while still being based on events that actually happened, like John baptising, the temple being cleared of sheep and oxen and money changers, new teachings about the father and the spirit, and about human kind, and finally new life after death.

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"But he was speaking about the temple of his body."

This short comment points to the mystery puzzle of physical resurrection v. life in the spirit, the physical body risen from the dead v. the community of his 'ecclesial' body, and so on (See Fuller loc. cit. above). Especially in John's writings we will never get an answer from one passage alone. I am led from this remark to another in ch. 6,63: 'It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is of no avail' - or as I would say it: 'The life we are talking about is intellectual/spiritual. The body alone is meaningless.' And applying that axiom in this case: the physical 'resurrection' would be meaningless without the spiritual life of the community as its corollary. Or in other words, to ask: What happened to the physical body of Jesus? is to ask a question which by itself is without meaning. What we can say, however,  and what we believe, is that after the temple which was his physical body was destroyed in his violent death, there was raised up after [another!] three days a temple not made with human hands, a community which is the born-from-above body of Christ where the spirit gives true worship to the father in spirit and in truth. 

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"...many began to believe in his name
when they saw the signs he was doing.
But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all,
and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well."

At the end of today's segment we have one of those enigmatic comments of which the last sentence is particularly intriguing. John tells us of more and more people starting to have faith in Jesus. After Cana his disciples began to believe in him; after the episode in the temple we are told that "therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe ..." And now in Jerusalem "many began to believe in his name when they saw the signs he was doing."

And then, by contrast, Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all. He didn't need anyone to tell him how fickle and unreliable human nature can be: he knew all about that already. Is John saying:

(a)  that Jesus as divine withheld his trust from people because with divine insight he knew better than to trust human? 

Or (b) that Jesus was well aware from his own experience of living 30 years or so in Nazareth how changeable and inconstant life is, lived in this strange body/spirit complex that we call 'human being'?

I think that (b) is less contradictory than (a). Like any sensible person, Jesus was not going to be swept along on a wave of popularity because he knew how unstable it was. He was not in the numbers game. His position was completely other than that of the politician seeking election by canvassing support. His sole purpose was to call individuals to be 'born from above' that they might eventually come to worship the father 'in spirit and truth'.