Love in the Gospel of John

An Exegetical, Theological, and Literary Study

Moloney, Francis J., SDB

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441245748
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The command to love is central to the Gospel of John. Internationally respected scholar Francis Moloney offers a thorough exploration of this theme, focusing not only on Jesus's words but also on his actions. Instead of merely telling people that they must love one another, Jesus acts to make God's love known and calls all who follow him to do the same. This capstone work on John's Gospel uses a narrative approach to delve deeply into a theme at the heart of the Fourth Gospel and the life of the Christian church. Uniting rigorous exegesis with theological and pastoral insight, it makes a substantive contribution to contemporary Johannine scholarship.

1
Entering the World of John’s Gospel

The Gospel of John, which appeared toward the end of the first Christian century, continues the tradition of Jesus’ speaking about love. The source of his teaching about love of God and neighbor, as found in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, is the Old Testament.1 When asked to identify the most important commandment (Mark and Matthew) on what to do to inherit eternal life (Luke), he responds: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. . . . You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:30–31; cf. Matt. 22:35–40). The expressions come from Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (love of God) and Leviticus 19:18 (love of neighbor). In Luke the same words appear, but Jesus elicits them from a lawyer (Luke 10:25–27). The settings are different. For Matthew and Mark the episode belongs to a series of conflicts with Israel’s leadership (see Mark 11:27–12:44; Matt. 21:23–22:46). For Luke, it introduces the parable of the good Samaritan, which Jesus tells in answer to the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29; see vv. 30–37). The evangelists may use the words of Jesus in their own way, but the combination of Deuteronomy and Leviticus to command love of God and neighbor most likely goes back to Jesus himself.2

The use of this command to love develops and changes direction from the Old Testament through Jesus into the Synoptic Gospels and finally in John.3 Jesus’ command to love as it appears in Mark, Matthew, and Luke never appears in the Gospel of John. Indeed, nowhere in John does Jesus request that the disciples love God. John has replaced this with a request by Jesus that the disciples love him and his commandments (14:15, 21, 23, 28; 16:27). He promises the disciples that if they love him and his commandments, his Father will love them (14:21, 23). Jesus and the Father share a union of love that Jesus does not share with the disciples for most of the Gospel (3:35; 10:17; 14:31; 15:9; 17:23, 24, 26). Only at the end, in his final prayer for disciples of all ages (17:20–26), does Jesus ask the Father that they be swept into the love that has always united the Father and the Son: “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (17:26 NRSV).

The Fourth Gospel also uses two different words to speak about the act of loving. All the passages cited in the previous paragraph use the Greek verb ἀγαπάω. In describing another series of relationships, Jesus, or John, uses the verb φιλέω. General Greek usage of these two expressions subtly distinguishes between them. The verb ἀγαπάω has come to be used for self-giving Christian love, while φιλέω maintains its classical meaning of “friendship love.”4 Though scholars have long debated the significance of John’s use of the two expressions, we need not resolve the matter here.5 However, with a summary glance at the passages using φιλέω we can see that some of the themes mentioned in the previous paragraph return. The Father loves the Son (5:20), Jesus loves Lazarus (11:3, 36), the one who loves his life loses it (12:25), the world loves its own (15:19), the Father loves the disciples (16:27), and Jesus loves “the other disciple” (20:2). The main difference is the use of φιλέω to refer to the negative loves of those who reject Jesus (the love of some for their own lives and the love of the world for its own). John uses φιλέω to describe Jesus’ love for “the other disciple” in 20:2 but not elsewhere in the Gospel. He regularly singles out the Beloved Disciple with the verb ἀγαπάω (13:23; 19:25–27; 21:7, 20).6

The focus upon the love of Jesus and love of one another reflects a very Johannine point of view. Central to the thought of the Gospel is that no one has ever seen God. However, his only begotten Son, who is forever in union with his Father, makes him known (see 1:18). This paraphrase of the final verse of the prologue to the Gospel (1:1–18) sets the scene for the story that follows. If you wish to experience the revelation of God—and that also means if you wish to experience the love of God—you will need to find it in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ (see 1:14–18), and be united to him in faith and love (14:15–24). John grounds his theme of love in the fact that the gift of Jesus to humankind flows from God’s love for the world: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (3:16). All discussion of love in the Fourth Gospel begins from this Johannine truth. Jesus is able to tell his disciples that God, his Father, loves them. But so close is the relationship between the Father and the Son that not to honor the Son means not to honor the one who sent him (see 5:23). What the earlier tradition (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) said about loving the Father, John has transferred to loving Jesus, the Son. Typically, the love that the Father has for the disciple depends upon the love the disciple has for Jesus (see 16:27).

Significantly, however, in the Fourth Gospel, the generic command to love one’s “neighbor” (πλησίον) seems to have become more inward looking. The object of Johannine loving is now “one another” (ἀλλήλων) rather than “neighbor.” This central element of the love theme is especially important in John’s account of the final encounter between Jesus and his disciples (13:1–17:26). In opening the so-called last discourse, the narrator indicates that Jesus loved his own “unto the end” (εἰς τέλος), loving them to the temporal end of his life on the cross, and consummately (13:1). Jesus concludes by praying that the disciples will be swept into the love he and the Father have shared from all time (17:24–26).7 In 14:21–24 he instructs them on the need to love him, his word, and his commandments as the key to being loved by him and his Father. In 13:34–35 and 15:12, 17 he commands them to love one another as he has loved them. But to lead into his commands at the heart of John 15, he uses vine imagery to address the crucial importance of the disciples’ “abiding” (μένω) in him as he does in them so that Jesus and the disciples may love each other as the Father and the Son love each other (vv. 1–11).8 They are to keep Jesus’ commandment to abide in his love, just as Jesus has obeyed the Father’s commandment and thus abides in God’s love (vv. 9–11).9 Having requested that the disciples abide in him and thus keep his commandments, Jesus immediately states the commandment twice, in 15:12 and 17. Between these two commands to love, Jesus tells his disciples that no one has greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (15:13). Jesus closes his prayer for unity with a memorable petition that his disciples of all time be one in love (17:21–23), and one with both Jesus and the Father, as the Father and Jesus are one in an intense unity of love (17:24–26).

This overview of the impressive use of the love theme in the Gospel of John indicates its importance for this early Christian story of Jesus. But there is more to the theme of love in the Fourth Gospel than those places in the narrative where nouns and verbs that ask for love or express love are found. Jesus not only speaks about love in words; he also shows it in actions.10 He spells it out in a special way in washing his disciples’ feet and giving Judas the piece of bread in 13:1–38;11 in his final prayer in 17:1–26; and in submitting to crucifixion, that “greater love” he referred to in 15:13 when urging the disciples to love as he has loved, εἰς τέλος (13:1, 34–35; 15:12, 17).

Contemporary Approaches

Over the centuries interpreters have assessed the meaning and importance of the love theme in the Gospel of John variously. Currently, three major approaches predominate. Since the groundbreaking work of Ernst Käsemann on the Johannine community as viewed in the light of John 17, and Wayne Meeks’s essay on the Johannine man from heaven, a number of scholars have seen the love command as a major element in identifying the Johannine community as an early Christian sect.12 For Käsemann, the love theme is essentially inward looking—it urges love for fellow members of the community: “There is no indication in John that love for one’s brother would also include love toward one’s neighbour.”13 He regards 3:16, on God’s love for the world, as a reflection of an earlier tradition that does not reflect true Johannine thought. He claims that this famous passage does not “give us the right to interpret the whole Johannine proclamation from this perspective.”14 Rejecting other forms of Christianity, as well as their non-Christian neighbors, the Johannine Christians developed their own “inner” Christian culture with its unique language and practices.15 In their Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John, Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh categorize all the passages that deal with love as exhibiting socially conditioned “antilanguage” in an honor-shame society. All exhortations to mutual love demand loyalty and unconditional commitment to the “core group,” “members of John’s antisociety.”16 The command to love and the experience of love are limited to the members of the community.

Joan Campbell has further refined this approach. In a very perceptive study—depending upon Michael Halliday’s work on antilanguage and Bruce Malina’s application of these theories to the Fourth Gospel, where he traces an antisociety17—Campbell argues, on the basis of a series of studies of John 2:1–11, 7:1–10, and 19:25–27, that the Gospel reflects an antisocial and antilinguistic reversal of established Mediterranean cultural norms.18 One finds the rejection of a fictive group regarded as Jesus’ “brothers” who claim special access to Jesus because of family relationship (see 7:1–10), also seen in Jesus’ reluctant support for his mother (2:1–11), whom he hands over to an inner group of disciples, represented by the Beloved Disciple (19:25–27). The inner group, representing the Johannine community, is an antisociety that has developed and used its unique antilanguage in the Gospel of John. The fictive “brothers” lay claim to a special relationship with the Jesus tradition, but the Johannine antisociety, specially privileged to care for the mother of Jesus, is excluding them by its use of an antilanguage.

These more sectarian readings of the Johannine Gospel and its background accept that love for one another has a “missionary aspect” (see 13:34–35; 17:23). However, the Gospel calls those outside to believe in order to be saved. It does not offer them love but exhorts them to believe. As Herbert Preisker puts it: “Love has already experienced a narrowing. . . . The depth of warmth and love remain, but it has lost in breadth and unlimitedness.”19 After a careful study that endorses and develops Käsemann’s argument with material from the Johannine Epistles, Jack T. Sanders pursues this understanding of this movement in early Christianity, claiming that Johannine Christianity is morally bankrupt. He strikingly concludes:

Johannine Christianity is interested only in whether he [the “outsider”] believes. “Are you saved, brother?” the Johannine Christian asks the man bleeding to death on the side of the road. “Are you concerned about your soul?” “Do you believe that Jesus is the one who came down from God?” “If you believe you will have eternal life,” promises the Johannine Christian, while the dying man’s blood stains the ground.20

Supporters of the second major approach locate the Gospel’s teaching on the love of God, the love of Jesus, and the love that disciples are to have for one another within a literary stratum in the history of the redaction of the Gospel that reflects the changing social and religious settings of the Johannine community. Most recently, Urban C. von Wahlde has joined a long line of scholars who claim that we can uncover these “stages” in the development of the Gospel as we now have it.21 He has argued that all the material describing God’s love or Jesus’ love or exhorting love for Jesus and for one another comes from the final stage in the redaction of the Fourth Gospel. Attempts to trace the strata in the Gospel, identified as a reflection of various stages in the text’s history, and the allocation of those strata to different people, settings, conflicts, and even ideologies, have long been a significant part of Johannine scholarship.22 Urban von Wahlde’s recent addition to this work, however one assesses it, has the advantage of tracing a unified and positive development of the Johannine tradition. For example, he makes no use of an “ecclesiastical redactor,” who attempts to draw the tradition in a more conservative direction, losing touch with the fundamental message of the evangelist.23 For von Wahlde no one has “betrayed” an earlier version. Each edition builds upon what has gone before.

The love material, found exclusively in what von Wahlde identifies as a third edition, has been strongly influenced by the teaching of the Johannine Letters. The first edition was a Synoptic-like Gospel. The second reflects the community’s separation from the synagogue (which took place, for von Wahlde, in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Entering the World of John’s Gospel
• 2. The Mission of Jesus: To Make God Known
• 3. The Hour Has Not Yet Come
• 4. Love in Action, Discourse, and Prayer
• 5. “It Is Finished”
• 6. “Love One Another as I Have Loved You”
• 7. “Those Who Have Not Seen and Yet Believe”
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings
• Notes
• Back Cover