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Thursday 3 January 2008

Divine dialogues - Part 1

In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is portrayed as a teller of pithy and pointed stories but in John’s Gospel this is not the case and, instead, Jesus is portrayed as engaging in conversation with those around. Nathanael, Mary the Mother of Jesus, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the crowds of Jews and their leaders, Mary and Martha, and Pilate are all examples of people who are recorded as having significant conversations with Jesus. Like them, the writer of this Gospel has entered into conversation with God himself and has entered “into the maturity and fullness of the Lord’s Prayer as a dialogue between Father and Son” learning to listen as well as to speak, “as Jesus listened to the Father and offered himself to bring to carry out the secret purpose which the Father could not bring to fruition without him”. For him, as for Jesus, self-consciousness has become prayer – a conversation with God.[1] It is this same conversation into which he, following Jesus, wishes to draw us.

Jesus as God’s Son is in conversation with both God the Father and with God the Spirit. The Son claims that he hears from the Father and speaks just what the Father has taught him (John 8: 26 – 29). He also claims that his relationship with the Father is not just one way, rather the Father also always hears the Son (John 11: 41 & 42). Similarly, he says that the Spirit will not speak on his own but only what he hears (John 16: 13). The Spirit is sent, like the Son, by the Father, but comes in the name of the Son to remind the disciples of everything that the Son said to them (John 14: 26 & 27). This interplay or dialogue within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit can be summed up in the words of John 3. 34-35:

“For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God; to him God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.”

John’s Gospel dramatises for us the extent to which Jesus was in the conversation with God and to which this conversation was Jesus. Conversation here is essentially another word for communion:

“God is no more than what the Father, Son and Spirit give to and receive from each other in the inseparable communion that is the outcome of their love. Communion is the meaning of the word: there is no ‘being’ of God other than this dynamic of persons in relation”.[2]

Stephen Verney called this the ‘Dance of Love’, the interplay between the Father, the Spirit and Jesus into which we are invited to enter:

“”I can do nothing”, [Jesus] said, “except what I see the Father doing”. If he lays aside his teaching robes and washes the feet of the learners … it is because he sees his Father doing it. God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, is like that; he too lays aside his dignity and status as a teacher. He does not try to force his objective truth into our thick heads, but he gives himself to us in acts of humble service; he laughs with us and weeps with us, and he invites us to know him in our hearts through an interaction and an interplay between us. It is this knowledge that Jesus has received from the Father, and in the to and fro of this relationship he and the Father are one. They need each other. That is the pattern of how things potentially are in the universe, and of how God means them to be”.[3]

In saying that we are called to enter in to this interplay within and between the Trinity, Verney is saying that we are called to join the conversation between Father, Son and Spirit. It is this that we see happening in John’s Gospel as Nathanael, Mary, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the crowds of Jews and their leaders, the disciples, Mary and Martha, and Pilate among others are all drawn into the conversation within the Godhead.

Mike Riddell brings this out well when he writes:

“To say that Jesus is the Word of God is to say that God wants to communicate with humanity, and that Jesus represents the essence of that desire to talk. A person’s word is a part of them; when it is offered to another, a part of themselves is offered with it. Jesus, the Word of God, is God’s word to us which contains most of what needs to be said. Jesus is the self-communication of God.”[4]

Being part of this conversation involves interaction with the primary revelations of God within our world – Jesus himself (and his body, the Church), the Holy Spirit, creation, and the Bible – all of which inter-relate in a conversation which is similar to that of the Trinity. The creation visually testifies to the power, glory and divinity of its Trinitarian creator but requires the Bible and God’s people for the articulation of that praise in poetry like Psalm 8 and in explanation such as Romans 1: 20. The Bible, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, records (among much else) the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus but cannot by itself capture all that Jesus said, did, was and is (John 20: 30 & 21: 25). The Holy Spirit takes from what belongs to Jesus and makes it known to those who are his followers (John 16: 14). Each is intertwined with the other in order that our revelation of God reflects as fully as possible the variety of this relational God who has initiated all that we are, see and know.

Again, this is an insight that derives from John’s Gospel. There, the Word is depicted as being the source of life in a creation which, nevertheless, has a separate existence being made by God through the Word (John 1. 3-4). The Word is Jesus, not the scriptures, but the words of the scriptures are our only record of the existence of the Word. The words of the Evangelist record the story of Jesus under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (John 15. 26 & 16. 26-27) drawing on the creation stories from the Hebrew scriptures as he begins to do so (John 1. 1). His own testimony is that Jesus is the Son of God (John 20. 30-31), an identification which he claims was first made by the Holy Spirit (John 1. 32-34).

[1] S. Verney, Water into Wine (London: Fount paperbacks, 1985), pp. 174 & 176.
[2] C. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 1997), pp. 9 & 10.
[3] S. Verney, The Dance of Love (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1989), p. 111.
[4] M. Riddell, God’s home page (Oxford: The Bible Reading Fellowship), 1998, p.42.

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