Several years ago the community in which I was living was rocked by a revelation about one of its former leading citizens. In their day this person was deeply, deeply loved, and a great contributor to the community. And whilst the person had left many years before the story became public, there were many in that place who believed them to be a deep personal friend, a role model and a companion. As you can imagine these people were somewhat traumatised by the process of being invited to learn something new about their friend.

The responses of people in the community were multifarious and complex. Some felt deeply betrayed by their friend. Some of these even came to think that they had been deceived into thinking the person was nice, when in fact they were capable of a life-destroying act. Others simply could not believe that their friend could be like that. And there were a few who attacked the person who had made the secret known or took aim at the media for reporting the revelations.

No matter the response, each person was seeking to work out how their relationship with the significant figure had been shaped or altered by the discovery of new facts. They were re-reading and re-telling the story of their lives and the story of their relationship with this person through the new set of lenses provided by the new insight. Even those who were practicing denial or ‘shooting the messenger’ were involved in this process. In their case they were revealing by their response that the reorientation was too difficult to undertake. They simply could not adapt to reality as it was now defined and so stayed with a past version of the story.

It was a complex time.

The observable dynamic in this is that the new information changed for ever people’s understanding of past events; in other words new information and new experiences cause us to reinterpret our lives. This story serves as model for how we tell our personal story and how we make sense of our lives. When we are asked to tell our story we do it in a way that suggests that we start at the beginning and then give a linear view of how our life has unfolded. The reality is that we tell our story from our current standpoint; from our current emotional state and so on. This is why devastating events can become less traumatic over time, as we experience love and goodness, and why events that we once rejoiced in can lose their shine as other life-events come to pass. We all know the tragedy associated with a career that has ended under a cloud or of the person who walked out in a fit of pique. Such events can lead one to see all that was achieved in the past as shallow, or at least less exciting. One bad experience can lead to a jaundiced view of all that went before; while one positive act can redeem and make sense of a difficult life. We read our stories backwards, interpreting the past through our present circumstances.

It is this dynamic which gives rise to the feeling that our lives have purpose. It gives us a sense of destiny; the feeling that our lives are on track or unfolding to a plan. The feeling of inevitability that we often attach to our lives is the product of the human activity of making meaning, of making sense, of tying disparate events together to make a logical whole. In some circles this dynamic is expressed in statements such as ‘God has a plan for my life’.

Understanding that this is the way we humans tell stories and make meaning is significant to our life of faith. This is because it is an insight that helps us in our reading of the gospel stories. The gospel stories reflect the dynamic we have identified. They too seem to be stories which begin at the beginning, move through Jesus’ life to his death, and then on to Easter and beyond. The reality is that each of the evangelists is writing their story from the Easter side of the crucifixion. They, and often their readers, knew that Jesus had overcome death. And they cannot help but read this fact back into the story. The Easter events are used to make sense of the rest of the story. The resurrection interprets all that Jesus did. Events that would have been understood in one way when the disciples were walking through Galilee with Jesus come to mean something else entirely when looked at with the gift of hindsight; when looked at from the Easter side of Jesus’ death.

The gospel according to John, from which our reading comes today, is the most advanced example of this phenomenon. The writer of this gospel has constructed a narrative around some key points of belief about Jesus that the community of faith held. So it is no accident that the current story, which starts with the feeding of the 5000, ends with Jesus saying ‘I am the bread of life’. Or that the story of the healing of the man born blind concludes with Jesus stating that he is ‘the light of the world’. Or that the resuscitation of Lazarus is summed up with, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. In fact the gospel according to John seems to be constructed around the great ‘I am’ sayings, the sayings captured in our most recently installed west end windows. The stories support the sayings.

It is possible that many of the events recorded in John did not actually happen. And it is ok that this is so. It is ok because history is not the writer’s interest. The gospel is the creation of a post-Easter community; a community which is experiencing Jesus in their midst through worship, and who wish to share with others the Jesus they have come to know and believe in. Our own Canon John Steele has written a manuscript in which he suggests that the gospel according to John may in fact be the text of a play, as those who joined with Canon Steele for his Lenten study this year will have discovered.

Knowing this background to the gospel is a liberating thing. It is liberating because it means that we can cease to be distracted by questions such as, ‘did this or that event really occur?’, while allowing ourselves to engage fully with questions such as, ‘what does this author want me to learn about Jesus?’

The gospel according to John invites us to discover how a particular post-Easter community had come to experience and know Jesus. To discover who Jesus was for that ancient community is to be given the opportunity to make the same discovery for ourselves. The feeding and the images of bread that we encounter in the story we have been pondering over the past few weeks are deliberate allusions to the Eucharist. They invite us to discover that the early Christian community met the risen Christ in the breaking of the bread; alerting us to the possibility that we too might meet him here, and in and through our worship be strengthen by the risen Christ.

 

+Amen

© Peter Catt

 

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Last updated: 7 February 2010
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