Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to by the well, a lectionary based podcast of preachers recorded on the land of the Wurundjeri people.
Hello, all. I'm Kylie Crabbe, and I'm extremely glad today to be welcoming as guests two fantastic scholars of John's gospel. We've got Catrin Williams, who is from the University of University of Wales, Trinity St. David's, and Alicia Myers from Campbell University in North Carolina from the divinity school there. And both of these fantastic people are also research fellows at Bloemfontein, South Africa, from the University of the Free State. So they are happily joining us so that we can talk a little bit about John six. Thanks for joining us today, both of you. Thank you.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Happy to be here.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Fantastic. So today we're talking about the readings for the 12th week after Pentecost.
Now, the main focus that we're going to talk about is John six in general, but also the particular reading, which is John 635 and then 41 to 51.
And we're not going to focus on the other readings for the week. But I do want to just let you know there'll be some notes in the show, notes about other resources to listen to about that. There's psalm 130, which people might remember we spoke about on the 6th week after Pentecost. So there's an episode already delving into that and some other resources about the second Samuel reading. But with such a wonderful opportunity to talk about this, I thought that we could just really get stuck into this John six reading.
But before we do that, I wonder, Alicia and Catrin, do you want to just tell us a bit about the kinds of research that you've been doing? They've both been here for a wonderful new Testament international conference that's been held in Melbourne this past week. So we're glad to have them here. But tell us a bit about what you generally are working on from a band, John.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Well, you both write quite a bit about John. I've written a commentary on the gospel and letters of John that's been out for, gosh, since 2019.
For this week, I came and did a paper on John 17 and Theophany in John 17.
I have a book coming out with Cambridge in the spring, I hope, on the theology of the Gospel of John. And I'm getting ready to start a book on one through third John, which will come out with Sondervan, their word biblical theme series. And Catrin and I have a project together that we're working on, too. I'll let her describe that.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: Yeah, we're working together on a handbook, TNT Clark Handbook of johannine studies. We'll have 40, 40 tributars.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Fantastic.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: All kinds of different themes and passages in the gospel. So we're hoping to get all the essays in by Christmas and that will give us about six months then to get it to. To the publishers. Yeah, that's a big part of our project going ahead.
I also work on a lot on John's gospel. I've written a book on the. I am sayings.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Ah, perfect. That might come in handy today. I think we might be perfect, definitely.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: And then I've edited a lot and I've written a commentary on the book of Revelation. So most of my work has been on revelation or John. And I'm now writing the commentary for the ICC series, which is the, you know, the one that usually takes about 20 years on the letters of John. So I've got a very long deadline, but it'll come quickly, of course. They always do.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: So broadly across Yanna and literature or this stuff. That's connected. Yeah.
[00:03:59] Speaker C: Yes. Beautiful. We both actually share an interest in the. The way jewish scriptures are used in the Gospel of John. We use very different methods, but we often come to similar conclusions, don't we, Alicia?
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we do. It's funny, I feel really happy when that happens.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Nice confirmation.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Catron saw that too. Okay.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. No, I was thinking, because Catron gave a wonderful paper at this conference that we've just been at that was touching on some of these questions of the way that jewish scripture is used and interpreted and supports the message of John's gospel. So it was wonderful.
Okay, well, fantastic. Anyway, as you can all tell, I'm pretty excited to have these guys here to talk about this. And, I mean, I'm going to launch in with a question then about John six, which, frankly, I think must be on everybody's mind, but maybe particularly people who don't always work in John's gospel, might have a worry about this, which is. It's five weeks of John six, people. What are we. What do we do here? Why is the lectionary doing this? I mean, you know, as people will know, I've thought a lot about some. Some other passages, including John nine, because of my work on disability. And I noticed that this is a. You know, we have these long episodes in John's gospel. Yeah. You know, these long things. I noticed that we managed to have John nine all in one week. But for John six, the wisdom of the lectionary gives us five long weeks to really delve into these passages. I know some people use it as an opportunity to look at the Hebrew Bible in a more intensive way than they might otherwise. But convince us, Alicia and Catrin, why should we be excited about five weeks on John six?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: It has all these different episodes. So it helps you actually see kind of the traveling that happens in this passage. And there's different. I mean, in one way it's good because it gets you to slow down and you can look at over an extended period of time. The danger of it is that it makes you atomize each section and you don't actually see how they go together.
But, I mean, I'm sure part of the reason is because of connections to traditional interpretation and eucharist and sacrament.
But it's in the middle of Jesus's pivotal. Yeah, it's pivotal, yeah.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: I think compared to John nine, John nine clearly has a, you know, narratively it has a very clear design, doesn't it? And it's got seven quite neat episodes. And you can, you know, you can see the progress and the blind man. Yes, progression in terms of faith. You know, the terms that, the titles he uses for Jesus. So you can start and you can think, right, this is going somewhere. And there's a kind of a cumulative effect with John six. It's a little bit more kind of rocky on the road, I think, you know, that. You think you understand. Why do they ask for different signs? For instance, they've just seen Jesus, you know, with a feeding miracle, and yet they're asking for more. More bread, more signs. And so it's kind of a way of really making you think as to what's going on and probably a deliberate way of stalling the plot a little bit.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you catch Jesus interacting with different crowds and different types of people throughout, and it's like gauging the responses of all these different groups, like how are the disciples responding to Jesus and what he's saying?
Trying to figure out what Jesus expectations are, because right at the outset of the chapter, we're told Jesus is testing the disciples. So that kind of thing is if you keep that all the way to the end of chapter six, when Jesus talks about to Peter, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter's like, no, of course not.
And Jesus says, well, I've chosen you, right? But you have this. Those are kind of bookending. Who's really with Jesus, who's not kind of thing. But then you have him run into these crowds and how do the crowds react?
Jewish religious leaders how are they reacting? Like you have that weird section that we'll go into in verses 41. And on all of a sudden, the Judaioi, which we all struggle to translate, Judeans or Jews, they show up and they're grumbling.
And before we had just had a crowd. So we have this.
Who is he talking to at all these different times and how these different groups are trying to quantify Jesus in a way, trying to define him and figure out, okay, this is who you are. I can put you in this box. And right about the time they set him in that box, he just messes it up.
[00:08:37] Speaker C: Yeah, you could look at it as, you know, is it a kind of a contrast between insiders and outsiders? But it's more complicated than that.
Even the disciples, as Alicia was saying, they kind of give out the right signals with the sea crossing episode. They want to take him into the boat. But what does that mean? I mean, really, if they've just seen him walking on the sea, why does.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: He need a boat?
[00:09:05] Speaker C: Exactly. You know, I mean, yeah, there's an introduction of a new miracle there at the end, but. But I suppose John has always got the sight towards the end of the gospel, and it's too early for them to have full belief there anyway, isn't it? They've got to wait until he's been crucified and resurrected. You know, you wait for Thomas at the end to make that confession. So it would be premature here to have them kind of responding as, you know, to what is basically a theophany.
And then there's that kind of another division within the so called insiders at the end.
But I think it's interesting how much the scriptures play a part in all of this. It's like kind of a mosaic, you know, that you mentioned the grumbling that's absolutely out of the exodus narrative.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Yes. So let's talk about that then, though. So what are the, you know, what is lying behind this passage? How are we to see this riffing on the hebrew story, or is it countering it, is extending it? What's happening here? Or what do we need to, what are the things that the first readers of this gospel might have noticed?
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Sounds like Exodus. I mean, we would call it Exodus 16, but it sounds like the manna episode or how it's retold in psalm 78, which is just a recapitulation of the exodus narrative, but being in the wilderness, needing food, food's being provided. And then Jesus, the crowd will actually explicitly appeal to that story in verse 31. And you're like, oh, good. They're showing Jesus what they know, right? They're showing them, I know my Bible. And then Jesus says, nope, you've got it wrong.
Moses didn't give you the bread. My father is giving you the bread right now. And then there'll be these comparisons to the manna that was in the past and to who Jesus is right now.
So it's always in the background, and it's not a complete repudiation, but I like the way Catrin talks about it as a reframing with social memory kind of work.
[00:11:19] Speaker C: Yeah. And, you know, it's so ambiguous you've got. Because the paper I gave a few days ago here, I was looking at it, and I was thinking, everybody thinks that that first passage where he gives bread is all about Moses and that Jesus is the new Moses. And then I looked at the scriptural passages, and I thought, no, what that passage is saying is that he is obedient to God's command. You know, all this thing about God testing the Israelites, you know, that comes right to the beginning of Exodus 16. Well, who's doing the testing here? It's Jesus. So there's that kind of oscillation here between, you know, which category do you want to put Jesus in, or do we need to put him in a category? And I was thinking, you know, even the mountain motif, again, you know, you look at the commentaries, they all say, oh, here we are. Jesus is like the new Moses. Reading it through the sermon on the mount, I think.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. It's very methane, isn't it? Yeah.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: But really, why Moses? Why not the kind of locusts of divine revelation, you know, and is it a relevant. The fact that he comes down from one mountain, then suddenly he's gone up.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: Again and withdrawn again.
[00:12:32] Speaker C: Is that deliberate? You know, the kind of a different sense of why he's on a mountain.
So I think there's a. I must say, I think that this is written by somebody who really got a grasp of what scriptural texts are saying. But also, you know, Leisha was talking about psalm 78. There are some interesting developments in that psalm, such as the emphasis on God being unseen. Yeah. Footprints unseen. And then suddenly you've got Jesus. His footprints are seen.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:08] Speaker C: So there's that real shift in what people should take from these passages.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Right. And that takes you all the way back to the prologue, word 117 and 18.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: John says, very beginning of the no.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: One has seen God before but God the only begotten or the only, the one of a kind God. Monogenesis is terrible to translate.
[00:13:29] Speaker C: Let's hear your translation. Delicious.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: I think I say the one of a kind God or the unique God, because that's really what it is when we do only begotten. We get into weird territory.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: It's a bit doctor Len, isn't it?
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's also just not what it means.
That one makes him known.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: And it's that one exegetes. That's the passage I turn to when my students don't want to do exegesis and I show them that it is biblical.
But the exegeting is the showing the way, like, interprets. But it also can be a term used of, like, honestly, seers and oracles. They're interpreting signs. They're interpreting what, you know, in a non jewish context, what do the gods want? Right. And in a jewish context, what does God want?
And so Jesus is this embodiment, manifestation of divine presence, theophany. And in his being, he makes God known. Right.
And so that's going to change the entire Hebrew Bible, the entire way you read it and engage with it. And I think that's what John's doing the whole way through. He's just tweaking it slightly, but also dramatically.
[00:14:39] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And you see that very much in the. I am saying, because, again, you know, part of John's kind of modus operandi is that it teases people with its language. So what does ego, Amy. I am mean there. You could say it just means, hello, it's me. But that doesn't really capture what this chapter is trying to do for a lot of reasons. First of all, the text does say that they see him walking on the water. So that's quite different from Mark, you know, with the. The ghost motif and things. And, you know, I've done quite a lot of work on the I am sayings, and you don't find that phrase very much. Yeah, yeah. Only where God speaks.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Yeah, because you don't need it. Right. The way that Greek works, it presumes the kind of, you know, that people may already know this but may not. The word itself changes to show who is doing the acting when you've got something. So that kind of information, the I am bit of a verb in Greek, would often just be presumed by the word.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: So this is really kind of. I don't know, is it overwriting? Katjen? What's that?
[00:15:52] Speaker C: It's setting a marker, isn't it? It's going to say, come on, if you know your scriptures.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:57] Speaker C: You should know what this is doing.
But then I think, and I got to think more about this in recent years, that there is a really strong connection here between that statement and what happens, which is that he does deliver them to the other side. So there's your first kind of link between the words I am and what Jesus does, which is to offer them life.
And then, so really, the. The bread of life is a natural progression from that. And we kind of tend to think about those metaphorical I am statements as talking about life and those kind of absolute statements where there is no predicate or no metaphor as not so much being more about identity.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: I think it's all together.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: Yeah. They're more rolled up in each other.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah. So when you say that catching, you're talking about, you know, he does deliver them to the other side, and then we've got the bread.
And then you're sort of contrasting maybe with the commentaries that say that Jesus is like Moses. So here Jesus is. Am I right? Jesus is like the God of Moses. You know, the I am who calls Moses from the bush. Is that what's going on here?
[00:17:14] Speaker C: That's what I'm becoming more and more convinced by.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: A lot to do with my conversations with.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: You know, just things like the start of the passage that we're looking at for this particular week, this podcast, you know, talks about the son of man giving, and then God gives the bread. So there's some kind of boundaries being broken down there already.
But interestingly, you know, it doesn't say it's not Moses.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: No.
[00:17:50] Speaker C: You know, we.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: It's just more than.
[00:17:52] Speaker C: It's just more than. But if, you know, it says there, where are we? 631. Our ancestors ate the manor in the wilderness, and then he gave them bread from heaven to eat. And then Jesus says, very truly, I tell you it was not Moses. Well, they haven't mentioned Moses there, have they? So it's kind of what's going on there.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Yeah, he's anticipating it.
[00:18:14] Speaker C: Anticipating it, yeah.
But I suppose it's because they're looking for a sign of legitimation.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: And God doesn't need to legitimate himself with signs, I don't think, does he, in the scriptures? Whereas Moses did.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Moses did.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: And it seems like across John's gospel, this is one of the things about the signs, right. That they can. They are signs, but they can also lead you astray a little bit if you're in them for the wrong reasons.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, and it's interesting. So in my first book, way back in 2012, I looked at scripture in John, like, how it's used to characterize Jesus, and Jesus is usually not compared directly to people, but to things in the story. So even this tag with Son of Man and Benjamin Reynolds and folks have done a lot of stuff on Son of Mandev. I've done only these little bits, but that tag, son of man. And Moses comes, you know, chapter three. And Jesus says, just as Moses lifted up the son of man or the snake, so must the son of man be lifted up. Well, there Jesus is being compared to the serpent. You know, here Jesus is being compared to the manna. So it's like these Moses stories are under there, but it's always slightly to the side. And every time somebody tries to categorize Jesus, like, even the samaritan woman, are you greater than our father, Jacob? Well, Jesus doesn't say yes, but he compares himself to the. You know, he's like, I'm the one giving you the living water. So he's not Jacob so much as the. Well, like, he refuses to be put in these sort of person categories. And it's because from John's perspective, Jesus is the logos, so Jesus is the word. Jesus is the one who sent them, you know, like they were when faithful, speaking him, speaking his being. And so he's constantly like, no, you're really close, but it's opposite. So that's why Moses isn't bad. Jacob isn't bad. Scripture is wonderful in John, but it always has to be turned a bit.
And it's really hard to do if you don't have the prologue. And, of course, no character in the story has the prologue, only the audience does. So we're at such a huge advantage over poor Peter, who's like, yes, we have believed and we have known that you are the holy one of God. You know, he doesn't know what he's saying.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:44] Speaker C: But what the prologue also does, of course, is that it uses vocabulary that can appeal to people from all different cultures.
And is that maybe also behind, you know, not. Doesn't go against what you've just said about the logos, but that when you refer to Jesus as the vine or the shepherd, it's not tying it down to a particular schema, is it?
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Yeah, but neither is the I am right, because we talked about that this week in greco roman, like, non jewish theophanies, or they call them epiphanies. There's this key moment where the God reveals themselves, and they'll say, I am Dionysius or something. There are a variety of keys, markers that would catch to different ears. And it's important for us to remember the diversity of audience then, but also now.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: So one of the things that that does is like, thinking about the prologue as a kind of overview of the themes that we're going to discover across the gospel. And Catron has already mentioned about, you know, things being pointed towards the end of the gospel and understanding. So, I mean, there's a kind of play with time, I guess, in how we read the text, and we've got the stuff that, of course, that will be, you know, blessed are those who believe without seeing that we eventually get to in the Thomas story.
And so, of course, as Catrin said earlier, there is this sense already that it would be premature for people to see and understand. This is what's going to happen the whole time that they see and they don't quite understand. And then it kind of comes together in new ways, and the audience benefits from the richness of how that comes together. But one of the things that people might often say about John six is that it's kind of eucharistic because it's a further play with time. But I'm wondering what you think about that. Is this us kind of overriding the over interpreting what's going on in John to say, well, there's no bread and wine at the last Supper in John, but it's here.
I mean, what do we make of that side of it?
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Catherine points at me.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a little bit of buck passing going on here. I'm asking too tricky a question. I should have given them a heads up.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: I mean, honestly, in a contemporary church, like, if I'm using this in church, I don't see a problem as long as you're using it with awareness.
My thing is, I want to look more at when is Eucharist being performed as a meal by first christians, and what does that even mean? Yep, but acknowledging the interpretation history, the rich interpretation history of this passage, I don't think it's wrong to engage with that. But I would also want to ask, what is John up to in the plot of the story?
And there's a reason John decides to do the foot washing meal at the end and not.
I mean, he's not gonna do a Passover meal because Jesus is the Passover lamb, so we don't have that yet, but he chooses to do the foot washing. Now, the foot washing is connected to this passage with that little verb, trogo, which is munch or chomp, which I don't know how? I can't remember how the NRSV translates it off the top of my head. But in verses 51 through 58, Jesus says his usual thing, where in John he's like, oh, you don't understand what I've said. Let me make it harder. So he gets more gross, basically. And he talks about chomping the flesh, which. That's what animals do.
Gosh, that's frustrating.
[00:24:21] Speaker C: You know, that kind of lends itself to a eucharistic sensation, doesn't it?
[00:24:25] Speaker B: It's like, what animals do? They bite. And so that's why you're biting living flesh and drinking blood. You're doing it at the same time. It's really gross.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Graphic. Yeah.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: And in chapter 13, Jesus then quotes psalm. What is it? 41. And he changes the verb that's in the psalm to Trogo. So when he's describing what Judas is about to do and what they're doing.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: They'Re eating, tearing apart this.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think there is a connection. I just would say I'm fine to connect it to Eucharist, but also make sure you ask what John's doing, because what happens is you might miss it.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: You don't want to miss it.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you just look for the symbol that you think is there, you might miss a really significant other part of the story.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: I mean, ironically, then you're doing just what the crowd did.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: Jesus, I'm quoting my scripture to you. And he's like, great.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: But actually, one of the things I was thinking about when we were talking about this with the reuse of Exodus is like, if you think of which characters are most like, the characters from the exit, I mean, it's the crowd that's the memory of the Exodus story more so than the other characters. Right.
[00:25:32] Speaker C: The disciples are described as grumbling as well. Yes. Which is fascinating. I think that, you know, you kind of think, oh, this is the kind of the Israelites that must be ethnically related, but it's much broader than that in terms of the dilemmas that they're facing, in terms of the hard teaching that's mentioned there.
Yeah, I think that's underplayed a bit, really, isn't it, that the grumbling motif is.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: It's really strong character specific.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Yes. Yep. And as always, when we're reading John's gospel and Elisha's already mentioned about the difficulty of translating eudaioi as, you know, Jews or Judeans. And then how even if whatever decision we make there, how we think about how that kind of category relates to all the other characters in the story. You know, if this is a disagree, if any conflicts in genre within the family, rather than between kind of Jews and as though Christians were a separate group by this stage, which, you know, we're thinking they're not. So this is part of the.
I don't know, it feels to me like that is part of the continuity that shows us this is not anti jewish stuff. Because, in fact, all of the characters are playing into this. Right. The disciples are just like the Israelites because this is a continuation of that story in some sense.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Well, I mean. I mean, it is or it isn't anti jewish, depending on how you understand jewish, right.
I mean, John's taking of Israel scripture and saying, no, you haven't got it quite right.
He's got some very harsh polemic for people who disagree with him. So in that way, absolutely anti. And like, you have to construct the scriptural story through Jesus, and sometimes John, like, through Jesus in the way I've done it. Right.
So I do think there is hostility there and we can't recover exactly why. There's lots of theories, but it should tell us to be careful with how we use it now. Yes, definitely. Because certainly the word Jewish means something different now.
And we cannot use these texts haphazardly.
In John six, the Judeans showing up all of a sudden, it's startling. We miss it. But perhaps they're actually from the south because he's in Galilee. So maybe they have followed him up. And that's getting you ready for chapter seven, when Jesus goes back to Judea and he gets in trouble with the Judeans and the Jerusalemites. So that's stuff that we can overlook. But it's so important that we recognize Christianity and Judaism are not separate. How much do they exist at this point? Certainly not in the forms we know. And what does it mean that John is a gospel written from?
They're a colonized group, a minority of a minority in a roman empire.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Wow. That's very different than where I am in the US. In the US south, where at least christian culture is dominant.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:33] Speaker C: But, you know, we have to bear in mind as well that Judaism was so diverse.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Indeed, indeed.
[00:28:38] Speaker C: And that, you know, we can't label it as. Was it jewish? Anti Jewish, because we don't know. Whatever. I mean, we do know that scripture was a site of contestation.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:28:50] Speaker C: Yeah. You look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocalyptic texts from the period, what we do realize is that this author was an absolute first class exegete in terms of this author knew all forms of jewish exegesis. You know, that quotation that really lies at the heart of this week's, you know, the focus of the passage.
He's not just taking a quotation randomly from Exodus 16. He's used words from Psalm 78. So. And he does that all the way through, you know, they call kind of composite citations.
And so he'll use exactly the wording from scripture that suits his own. But the issue, of course, everything in the end comes back to Jesus.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But we get this. I mean, I guess what is important as in addition to that, is thinking about the way that different groups within Judaism also did this.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: So we get, you know, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we get interpretations of scripture that is making sense of things in light of the teacher of righteousness, who's the person they're looking towards. We get the conflict from the prophetic literature. So I think this is. Well, I'm enjoying the conversation. You know, it's important, right, that there is this sense. It's not that there's not conflict there. It's about, as Alicia's saying, about how we bring that into the contemporary, how the words do or don't play in our contemporary setting, what those words mean and what we think conflict within a community or within kind of factions within a community might have looked like.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: Right?
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So we've had a wide ranging conversation across John six. I'm sort of thinking as we kind of pull things together or draw to a close, you know, what is there something that particularly stands out to you, whether across that whole passage or across the whole chapter or the passage, particularly for this week?
You know, what would grab you in your contemporary context that you might want to focus on or not or, you know, how would we bring this alive to a group of people this week?
[00:31:02] Speaker C: I think we've covered a lot of it already in terms of responses and the diversity, the variety of the responses to and that they're being tested and the kind of. You feel as though that middle part where they're on a journey from one part of the lake to the other. You do feel as though there is that kind of sense of progression here. Nobody's quite there. I mean, Peter makes a wonderful statement at the end about you are the holy one of goddesse, but he doesn't come out very well later on in Gospel. So it's that kind of, you know, Susan Hyland's talk written about this, about the ambiguous believers, and I found that really helpful.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: And I think it's helpful to ambiguous believers.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Her book is called Imperfect Believers.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: Imperfect believers. Since I already feel like I can relate to this book, I'll have to look it up.
[00:31:58] Speaker C: We kind of think about John. We try and put the text in neat packages because of this contrast between light and darkness and belief and non belief. But what this chapter really helps us understand is that, you know, the journey that these characters go on, as with believers today, is far more circuitous and that people don't always. Things don't just fall in place quickly.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And you need divine help. I mean, John's like Jesus says, you know, you don't come to me, the father drags you.
Drags you to me, because we come with these presuppositions that can lead us astray. So in this story, you just have.
Everybody's trying so hard to define who Jesus is, but he's bigger, he's more. And he says, you know, you have to be taught by God in order to understand who I am. And we talked about that this week, how John simultaneously says, you know, I mean, in John three, Jesus says, you know, we know the truth. Yes, but the moment you say you've known all the truth, we are taught by God. But the moment you say we are taught by God, and so therefore have superiority over everybody else, well, then you've lost it. And so there's this constant tension. I think John calls us to read and reread and reponder, and for John, that's asking the spirit to participate and to reveal things to us over and over again. And the moment you start to get too comfortable and too sure, Jesus is going to say something that will disrupt that equilibrium. And I think that's on purpose.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: That is perhaps a wonderful explanation, too, of why we might have five weeks on John six. As we kind of keep going over this and wondering about this imagery and wondering about the invitation to come to some understanding or some sense of presence within this text.
Heartfelt thanks to both of you, Catrin and Alicia, on behalf of all of the by the world crew. We're very glad to have been able to learn from you in this episode.
And thanks so much. Thank you.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: By the well is brought.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: To you by Pilgrim Theological College and the Uniting church in Australia.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: It's produced by Adrian Jackson. Thanks for listening.
