A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [64]
His other miracles—healings, provision of food for hungry people, giving life to a dead man, conquering death himself—all suggest Jesus’s life-giving, health-giving creative power. Together, these examples make clear that from the first sentence John is telling us that a new creative moment, a new Genesis, is happening in Jesus. The Genesis echoes keep resounding to the end of the book, where they ring out powerfully in the climactic account of the resurrection:
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. (20:1)
Consider the imagery: the first day of a new week, the coming of light into darkness and life into a void. The language evokes a new day, a new beginning, so the tomb becomes the womb giving birth to a new creation. Not only that, but just as the book of Genesis ends with reconciliation as Joseph and his brothers are brought together, and just as it concludes with God’s good intent overcoming evil human intent, John’s gospel ends in the same way, with a reconciliation among brothers. The risen Jesus could have been angry with his disciples for betraying, abandoning, and disbelieving him, but he tells Mary, “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (20:17). Soon we see doubting Thomas being restored to his brothers and denying Peter being restored to his brothers. The gospel fittingly ends not during a scenic sunset, but just after daybreak, around a breakfast-cooking fire, the beginning, as it were, of the first day of a new world, a second Genesis.
In this light, Jesus’s offers of “life of the ages” and “life abundant” sparkle with new significance. When Jesus promises “life of the ages” (a far better translation of the Greek zoein aionian, I believe, than “eternal life,” the meaning of which is poorly framed in many minds by the six-line narrative), he is not promising “life after death” or “life in eternal heaven instead of eternal hell.” (John, it should be noted, never mentions hell, a highly significant fact.)4 Instead, Jesus is promising a life that transcends “life in the present age,” an age that is soon going to end in tumult. Being “born of God” (1:13) and “born again” or “born from above” (3:3) would in this light mean being born into this new creation. So again, Jesus is offering a life in the new Genesis, the new creation that is “of the ages”—meaning it’s part of God’s original creation—not simply part of the current regimes, plots, kingdoms, and economies created by humans in “the present evil age” (a term Paul uses in Gal. 1:4). No wonder the risen Christ’s first appearance is in a garden, and he is imagined to be a gardener (19:41–42; 20:15), just as Jesus has portrayed the Father as a gardener (15:1)—John wants us to see in Jesus a rebirth of the original garden.
These Genesis themes are strong, but the prime Exodus narrative of liberation and formation resonates even more strongly in John’s gospel. Notice the obvious resonances with Moses in chapter 1:
He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him…. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. (1:11, 17)
Just as Moses was initially rejected by his brothers (Exod. 2:14), so Jesus was initially rejected. Just as Moses led the way in liberation from Egyptian oppression, Jesus leads the way in liberation from the social and spiritual oppression of his day. Just as Moses gave the Law, Jesus gives it even more so—as we shall explore in more detail shortly. In fact, although much attention has been given to the ways in which “the Word” or “Logos” of John 1 evokes Greek thought, we should also note that for Greek-speaking Jews “Logos” evoked Law. The Law was understood not simply as a list of rules or requirements, but as a kind of inherent logic or wisdom that is woven into all of creation—a