I said recently in this column that it would be good to get back to the “ordinary time” of the church’s Easter season.
Then I realised that in no time at all, we’re going to be bumping up against the Ascension and Pentecost.
Federal elections, papal elections, and getting used to “Pope Leo” in the canon of the Mass all seem to make time go so much faster.
I sometimes wonder what the passing of time felt like in the early church. Did they too think, “Wow, it was just yesterday that he rose from the dead—and here we are 10 years later?”
Or is it that our modern lives are so dominated by timepieces and schedules of all kinds that we feel it differently?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I suspect that for St John the evangelist, time moved differently for the rest of his life.
St John is the apostle whose interior life we know the most about from his own writings.
His Gospel and letters are so luminous and so transfixed upon the person of Jesus that it’s like he is still there, looking at him and describing what he sees before his eyes.
St John seems to have captured that sense of the eternal now of God—that when we are in touch with God, we are absolutely in the present moment.
The present moment is where time touches eternity. That’s where we should aspire to be when we pray.
And if you want to know what that looks like, read St John, because that’s where you will find him.
We also read St John’s Gospel on Good Friday because he was the only eyewitness who later put everything down in writing.
His account is so detailed that some scholars said it couldn’t possibly be authentic. They thought it was concocted after John’s death by an “early church community.”
And yet if you know anything about human beings, John’s account rings utterly true.
It’s someone who will never forget what he saw as long as he lived. All the little fishhooks of memory are there.
He is the only evangelist to record Jesus washing his disciples’ feet at the last supper. And he doesn’t mention the institution of the Eucharist—because he doesn’t need to.
Instead, he’s given us an entire chapter (chapter 6) on that earlier.
John remembered that the name of the high priest’s servant was Malchus.
He also puts the last supper on a Thursday, so that Jesus dies on the cross on what was called a “preparation day,” or Friday before the Passover sabbath.
John was the one who knew the high priest well enough to gain entry to the inner building where Jesus was questioned—and where Peter denied him to the onlookers who were milling about.
John also says that he and Peter couldn’t go into Pilate’s court because they still wanted to eat the Passover that Saturday.
So Pilate comes outside to them—which is how John heard the entire exchange between Pilate and Jesus, almost certainly conducted in Greek.
(I know Mel Gibson thought otherwise, but Greek was the lingua franca of the time, and Jesus grew up in Greek-speaking Jewish Egypt).
John saw Jesus mocked and beaten. He saw the soldiers gambling over Jesus’ clothes.
He could name the women standing by the cross. His is the only Gospel to tell us that Jesus gave us his mother for our own as he was dying.
John’s Gospel is also the only one to report Jesus’ thirst on the cross, and him saying, “It is finished.”
He reports seeing the blood and water gush from the pierced side of the dead Jesus – which we now know is medically accurate.
John is also the only eyewitness to tell us that he is an eyewitness. And I believe him. There’s too much there that’s obviously seared on his retinas.
But it’s also soaked into his own heart and mind and soul over the years that he’s thought about it. This is why the rest of John’s writing is so luminous.
It’s poetic, hymn-like, full of grace and truth. That’s why his passion account is so utterly realistic.
John does not flinch from recounting the awfulness and horror of what he saw. It’s only in the light of the resurrection that any of this makes sense—and John is also the great teller of post-resurrection episodes.
Have you been missing out on all this? Have a look at it for yourself and tell me if you agree with me or not.
