No annunciation or visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, no manger, no angels, no shepherds or wise men... they are all absent from John’s gospel. They are also absent in Mark’s gospel, of course, both gospels diving from the outset straight into Jesus’ public ministry beginning with his baptism.
Even so, these two gospels have very different purposes and structure. Mark’s narrative follows a more or less chronological order, and was possibly the source material for the Matthew and Luke gospels according to many scholars. John is different in that his aim seems to be to signpost various aspects of Jesus’ mission: indeed we know that what the other gospels might refer to as miracles are ‘signs’ according to John— signs pointing to the glory of God. The narrative of turning water into wine at Cana was referred to in John’s Gospel as the ‘first sign’, you will recall.
We will also see that John continues with the tradition of the Hebrew notion of the ’perfect 7’— seven signs and seven ‘I am’ sayings. Perhaps not quite so obvious is this Gospel’s link to the concepts of the Word and Wisdom, both strong in the Old Testament, and identifying them with Jesus. The beginning of the gospel, as we read every Christmas is, ‘In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God’ and what Isaiah 55:11 says: So shall my word be that goes forth out of my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please... We can find here a direct parallel with God sending out Jesus and Jesus accomplishing God’s mission.
The Father-Son relationship is the crux of the theology of John’s gospel (God is spoken as Father over 100 times in the Gospel and Jesus as Son over 50 times) and it has echoes in Proverb as well where we read that ‘the Word was there with God at the beginning of creation’.
Some commentaries on John’s gospel emphasise that John’s intention is to bring out the theology, and Jesus’ relationship to God, more than anything else. The details of his life history are much less important to John, the exception being the Passion narrative at the end. This could be at least partly because he assumes that the readers would already be familiar with the biographical details from other gospels. In the description of the Passover meal, for example, there is no mention of the meal itself, or of the institution of the Holy Communion. This may be because the church would already be celebrating Communion as a sacrament, or it could even be that theological definitions of sacraments he saw as being of secondary importance.
In his ‘I am’ statements, John is obviously not expecting them to be taken literally. ‘I am the bread of life’, ‘I am the light of the world’, ‘I am the vine’... cannot all be simultaneously true in a literal sense. Rather than definitions, they are meant to be portals through which we can see the nature of Jesus (and God). So we are invited to envisage what Jesus being the ‘good shepherd’ might mean to us, in our lives. There is no detailed job description of a good shepherd, but the words are just pointers to his relationship with the sheep in his care.
It might be to emphasise this point, namely that we need to imagine ourselves into what being bread, light, life and so on means, that John’s gospel deviates from the more common style of chronological narrative. Events are grouped together around signs or sayings so that they reinforce the theme. So ‘I am the light’ is followed by the healing of a blind man; ‘I am the bread’ leads into the feeding of the five thousand. This text is also placed close to Jesus saying, ‘He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him’—the symbolic meaning of the Holy communion—incidentally making up for the missed Passover meal detail!
So John is asking us in his gospel to make our relationship with God, that is, our theology, deeper and our own, through the insights he provides by the signs and sayings of Jesus.
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