Reading through this, having talked about it and having recently read a couple of Gospels, it was really cool to see the difference in styles between Matthew and Luke and now John.  John’s writing is much more of a group of stories woven together through reflections and teachings than it is a history lesson.  It is like John tells us something that happens and then he takes that a runs with it, illuminating ideas and thoughts that spring from his sharing of the story, and letting his thoughts wonder a bit, before coming back to another story and doing that on repeat.

In the first 5 chapters, we get a little of John the Baptist, we get the calling of the disciples, we get Nicodemus, the Woman at the well, and the healing of a man at the pool.  And, instead of history, we are getting narrative and ideas.  With John the Baptist, Jesus is showing us that John was telling us about Jesus...and that he had it right, that Jesus fulfilled his predictions.  With the calling of the disciples, John is showing us how obvious Jesus was to those who weren’t resisting Him; He had authority, He had influence, and He clearly was a unique person.  With Nicodemus John is teaching us what Jesus taught about salvation, about Grace, and about how wealth can be a formidable obstacle to a person accepting that Grace.  With the woman at the well, John shows us how Jesus was even forgiving the unforgivable, and how we are not in a place to judge others.  Then, last on this for the first 5 chapters, the man at the pool - we are taught that the sins of our past can even be wiped clean by Grace, that we are not prisoners to sin, that God can heal, does heal, and will heal, according to His plan and His timing.

And it is really cool the way John presents these, because feel like I can almost hear John hinting that these are little ah-ha moments he is sharing, almost like he is connecting the dots as he is writing, or that he is writing these words reflecting on the moments when it happened.  It feels like maybe he even had a journal he had kept to have these moments cataloged in real time.  It all definitely feels like he is sharing a much more personal experience though.

So that’s the first 5 chapters, we will pick up from there tomorrow and keep moving on in this initial read-through.