Chunks: The Letters of John

In this episode, I ask you to reflect on both the way that you have experienced communion or the Lord’s Supper in your church—and then to imagine what John might have remembered of his Last Supper with Jesus. Then consider: what does “communion” mean against the background of what John describes as a fellowship between believers that is also fellowship with the Father and Son?

In the life of the church, we use the word “fellowship” often, and without much thought. But what does it mean? Enjoying each other’s company? Having fun together? There’s much more to it than that. The biblical idea of fellowship, including what John says in his letters, is a challenge to our more individualistic ways of thinking. And to extend from what was said in the previous episode, John see...

As suggested earlier, John claims to give reliable eyewitness testimony to Jesus. But the full truth about Jesus can't be seen by the naked eye nor reduced to the reportage of a newsfeed article. As this episode will suggest, when John speaks of “eternal life,” he doesn’t just mean that we can live forever. He means something more dizzying: that through Jesus, we are drawn into the life he already...

One of John’s purposes in writing his letters is to correct the false ideas about Jesus that people in the community had heard. To that end, he sometimes seems to emphasize his credentials as an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus. But this isn’t just a matter of arguing over the facts or who has the authority to speak. He wants his readers to be continue to be astonished at the truth about Jesus:...

When we write messages to other people, it’s common to use pronouns like “I” and “you.” But in the opening four verses of 1 John, the apostle repeatedly says, “we.” Whom does he mean? There are different possibilities—but at the very least, he seems to be embracing his readers, as if to emphasize their mutual fellowship in God the Father and Jesus the Son.

Anyone who reads the four Gospels can easily see how different John’s gospel is from the other three, in both style and content. Much of John’s first letter reflects some of that uniqueness, in ways reminiscent of the Fourth Gospel. And in this third episode, we will see how unique even the very first verse of the first letter is, compared to the other letters of the New Testament.

We have to read between the lines of John’s letters to get at his reason for writing them. We might think of him as the lead pastor of a community of house churches. It seems that some of the members of the community had begun to believe and teach some heretical ideas about Jesus, possibly based on their willful misreading of John’s gospel, and these ideas were splitting the community. Thus, as th...

Reading the letters of the apostle John is a little like listening in on one side of a phone conversation. Even if you can hear what John is saying, he often speaks in generalities. And while the person on the other end of the line would have easily understood his meaning, we are often left to making our best guesses. This first episode of the podcast introduces some of the basic questions that mu...