John 21:24-25

Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for being with us as we get to the end.

The last words of the book of John.

And and I say that intentionally because they are very specific

in the Gospel of John, just a by way of transition.

The last couple of days, last couple of studies,

if you've been with us, hopefully you'll remember.

If not, it be worth checking those out as we move to this last piece.

Jesus has had a conversation with Peter

and an implication for his life as a disciple.

And following that, he's had a conversation with Peter

about John and, some,

some rumors squelching that John is trying to do.

But those both of those are important as we transition to this last piece.

So let me read it for you,

just the concluding verses here, and then we'll talk them through

verse 24.

This is the disciple who is testifying

to these things and has written them.

And we know that his testimony is true.

But there are also many other things that Jesus did.

If every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself

could not contain the books that would be written.

So the obvious bridge here is that as we

look at these last couple of passages,

Jesus talks about Peter.

He reinstates Peter.

He says something to Peter that John interprets

to be predictive of the way that Peter would die.

Then Peter asks about John, what about him?

And this rumor gets spread.

But then we conclude with, this is the disciple.

So Peter has his role in the work of Jesus.

And John, in a subtle way is saying, and I have my work.

And what is his work?

I'm the one who has written these things down, and they are true.

So Peter will go off, he'll preach, he'll be an evangelist.

John will do some of that as well.

But John understands that the recording

of Jesus's life, this sermon that he has preached and prepared

about who Jesus is and what it means,

is his work in service to the kingdom.

And then he says, you know, not that it's a final word, but it's enough.

It's enough for you to believe.

We've heard things like that from John before, but,

I suppose the

closest thing to this, Michael, might be the prolog of the Gospel of Luke.

When Luke says, I've, I've tried to make a good record of things.

So that you could you could know that they were trustworthy.

But, no other gospel ends like this.

This is this is very unique.

Yeah.

One commentator says that this is a curious ending.

I think that's a funny, you know, scholarly speak.

But I do think it's worth pausing here

and recognizing that in the early church,

we know because of acts, there was significant

jockeying and rivalry

for what spiritual leadership should look like

in that first generation of Christians, that there was a lot of things

that we now take for granted because history gives us a 2020 picture.

But realistically, they were figuring things out.

And here's Peter doing a substantial amount

of leadership as it relates to the church in Jerusalem

and sort of an institutional, even organizational kind of work.

And make no mistake, about it, when we have this text, this idea,

and we had this yesterday.

So if you want to see these verses 23 in that which came before,

you know, check out that.

But but if it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?

That's words given.

You know, to Peter, I think it's fascinating.

Here we have this idea

that, that we ultimately,

that we would

see this moment where the lasting legacy of John

is this authoritative telling of Jesus's life.

Right.

And that's what I find so interesting about these last words.

There are other things that could have been written.

In fact, you can imagine it the size of the library required

to record those stories.

But here

John's telling is the one of Jesus's life that's included in our four gospels.

I think there's a kind of recognition of each disciple played their own role.

And here John is explicitly stating that one of his roles

was to pen an authoritative witness to the life of Jesus Christ.

And now we see, I think, all of the threads that came

before, whether or not you want to get into the argument about,

you know, authorship and where this book does

and doesn't end and at what point something was added or included.

I mean, those things have been debated for literally thousands of years,

regardless of where you land on that, I think we have to affirm, Clint,

that there's something unique in the switch to first person here

in a book in which the idea of testifying to who Jesus has been has been so central

to the the key throughline of this story that we ourselves are witnesses,

this is a sign off of saying, and don't worry,

this book has been carefully written by someone who is themself a witness,

and I think that that is a compelling way to end this book, that

this whole thing has been about.

This is who Jesus is.

We know it because of those who testify to who he is.

Take heart.

The one who's giving you this one.

He was with Jesus the whole time.

Yes, structurally,

I think this is interesting because we have this is the disciple,

but then we have him referred to in third person.

His testimony is true.

We have this idea that this very closely resembles

the end of chapter 20, where it says Jesus did many of the things that

aren't in the book, but these are written that you might come to believe,

and that vocabulary seems very much echoed here.

Could have written a lot of things,

but I testify to these things.

There's so many other things

that could have been included that that they couldn't be contained.

The Jesus

is so much bigger than even this one telling,

which may indicate the awareness

of other gospel accounts and other stories that John,

for whatever reason, did or didn't include.

But I think more importantly,

the structural stuff, the

is this the same person?

That stuff is interesting, I guess, at times.

But I think more importantly is the connection here of what it means.

And what it means is that the one

who apparently refers

to himself as the disciple Jesus loved

shows his love for Jesus by telling the story.

And I think ultimately, that is an idea that John celebrates

the idea that our faithful oneness to Christ

means that we participate in

sharing the truth of Christ to others.

That's his purpose. That's what he's about.

That's what he's trying to do.

And I think that is,

I think that's a powerful takeaway

for any of those of us who call ourselves people of faith.

We may not sit down and write a gospel,

but we are all people who share the story and truth of Christ.

Yes, Christ is always bigger than our own experience of him.

But we are witnesses. What's the word here?

Testify in this?

You know how important that idea of witness and testify has been in this book?

If you've been through it with us,

he is a witness, as are we all.

And and I think it's behind the scenes, Michael.

It's not.

It's maybe not blatant, but, I think this is a bell that John rings

really loudly and probably intentionally.

And I think it's a wonderful takeaway as we get to the end here.

The idea of the testimony, I think is really important.

I think specifically this idea that we end this book in verse

24 with that language, this testimony is true.

And and Clint, everything hinges on that.

I think that the author of this gospel is honest about it,

that it all hinges on whether or not this is a true story, that Jesus was

who he said he was, that Jesus did what Jesus is claimed to have done.

Faith is built into this gospel.

And the reason this gospel was written and the reason it continue

to be distributed to Christians throughout the ages,

is because this account of Jesus's life is an essential

part of the larger witnesses of the Jesus stories.

To understand what Jesus was about, the reason for which he came, the task

that he set out to do, the teaching that he did, and the miracles

that in the case of John, the miracles that reveal

and give substance to the reality of who Jesus was,

the miracles have a way of showing us the truth of who Jesus was.

And that all hinges on the idea that this is a true testament.

It's a true telling.

There's a sense in which we understand that in our own era, the idea

in the modern world, a sort of investigative journalism,

the idea of showing the evidence and leading to someone to a conclusion

that John was written in a season and a time of culture

in which that idea wasn't yet conceived of in that way.

But this is in its own way, in its own time, to the people

to whom it was written.

This book did intend to make truth claims.

This book intends

to lay out the story of Jesus in such a way that it would resonate,

so that we might ourselves be confident in the truth that it intends to lay out.

And so, Clint,

I think we should be uncomfortable to take a book like this and to try to

to put the task on top of it, of doing a kind of historical 21st century

kind of work on the other hand, make no mistake about it,

this book, if we're going to take it seriously,

it wants to compel us to believe something to be true

because of the portrayal of Jesus that it gives.

And we need to be careful to not lose the balance of those two things.

I think if we go way back to the beginning, it makes it very clear.

Remember that this gospel opens with that beautiful section.

In the beginning was the word. The word was with God on and on.

But, when we get to the sixth verse, there was a man named John.

He came as a witness to testify that all might believe.

He came to testify to the light.

And you have that language of witness and testify used throughout

that first chapter as John sets the tone of the mission of John

the Baptist, but then later the mission of himself

and ultimately the mission of all Christians, that we are all called

to be witnesses, that we are all called to give testimony

by the way we live, by what we say and by what we do.

And I think,

If we I am chuck me here.

Michael, I don't know if this is a defensible statement.

All of the gospels

are doing evangelism in the sense that they're all trying

to share the story and the purpose of Jesus.

I think there is a sense where the word evangelist

applies to all four authors, but I don't know

if anyone deserves it

more more strongly than John does.

John, I think, is in some ways

most concerned, most attracted, most driven

by the idea of evangelism, of proclaiming the news.

And we've we've said this in other contexts.

This is why John, I think, is untroubled by the things that troubled us.

Why isn't this story in the same place it is in this other book?

Why doesn't this match up with that when did Jesus go to Jerusalem?

When did he turn over the tables?

When was the walking on water?

I, I, I just don't think that.

But I do think that John

presents what he's doing as history in the sense that it happened.

But I think ultimately the historical piece is less

important to John than the evangelism piece.

And and I find that a helpful way

to make room for some of the apparent discrepancies.

But I also just think it's a matter of purpose.

And I think if you asked John what's most important,

I don't think it's going to be months and dates and times.

I think it's going to be that

I'm, I'm trying to tell people the good news of Jesus.

And and again, all the gospels are doing that.

I just think John is doing it most blatantly.

I think there's a really interesting implication of this final statement.

I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

You know, they really interesting thing, Clint, is, yes,

we are troubled by the discrepancies. Yeah.

So when did this thing happen in the story? When did that thing happen?

Why does John's telling look different than Mark's telling?

Look different than Luke's? Why didn't you do Christmas.

That's that stuff gets a lot of attention.

You know what I think we need to recognize

is there's a shocking amount of similarity between these tellings, right?

And this this very passage, the idea that the world couldn't

contain the books that would be written.

You know, it's a very beautiful way of saying there's way

more content than what I'm including here.

But I've chosen the content that needs to be here. Right.

What's remarkable

is that in four tellings of Jesus's life, there is absolutely so many shared

stories that were considered essential to be in their telling.

And the idea that, you know, you have God doing all of these miracles,

that your four tellings are not just radically different

with the miracles told and the stories that are delivered

and the teachings of Jesus, what what is in some ways remarkable

is that with all of the diverse of these

of living with Jesus for all of those years, day in and day

out, traveling with him and hearing him and all these things,

that at the end of the day, even John, who gets a lot of credit for

for presenting that information in a way that diverges

from Matthew, Mark and Luke, who are called the Synoptic Gospels.

What's fascinating is there's so much similarity between their tellings

and, if anything, John, or most of those discrepancies.

We've pointed out ways in which they give a theological lesson,

or they're helping us to see, some way in which Jesus is now revealed

to be exactly the one portraying and living the thing that he's teaching.

I just think what is amazing and when you look at a book like this,

yes, John is doing things that give a distinctive

voice to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. No doubt about it.

It makes it one of the gems of the New Testament.

On the flip side of that, even with the long prayers

and even some of the really inscrutable sort of side comments

that we've had to tackle as we made our way through this book, this

book is unashamedly wanting you to know that Jesus Christ said a thing,

and he demonstrated the exact same thing with what he did, that

that there is a unit know Versal voice

between the lived and the spoken

in Jesus Christ, and that if you are willing

to look at that through the eyes of faith, that you're going to discover

that God took on flesh, that that's what John is bringing to the table.

And John's saying,

there's a lot of other content out there that that could have been used.

But at the end of the day, this is a telling of Jesus's story

for the purpose of evangelizing.

I think you're very right to point that out, Clint.

And ultimately John is not backed away.

John has been very upfront with the fact that this book is simply to be a primer,

or an example of what John I think fairly expects every Christian

to do not to write a gospel

that gets included in the scriptures, but to live your life in such a way

that there's a credible witness to the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And I think there's a beauty to these last words, whether you think

whether you're in the camp that says, yeah, chapter 21 feels tacked on.

So I think it ended with, you know, 30 and 31.

Jesus did many other things.

Or whether you're okay with this being the actual ending, and it says that

so many things that none of them could the world couldn't contain the books.

I think about the similar thing that those passages are saying.

There is always more to Jesus than we see,

than we know, than we can tell.

What a wonderful place to end a book that has so passionately

tried to present who Jesus is, to very humbly say, this is.

This is but one sliver of what it means that Jesus is Jesus.

And if you wanted to talk, everything that means there's not enough

space on all the earth to contain the things you'd have to write down.

What?

What a an incredible last word

to end this gospel or any gospel with to say

there is always more to Jesus than we can know,

than we can understand that we can communicate.

Jesus and this so, so well fits.

I think John's

personality and persona through this book

that Jesus is always bigger than we think he is.

There is always more.

There than the human eye can see, and the human mind can understand,

and that the human heart can can,

even follow or adore it.

I just think, what what an incredible way to end a book

that is so thoroughly about Christ to say,

don't get the idea that this is the full picture,

because it's only scratching the surface

because of who Jesus is and how much there is to what that means.

There are a lot of conversations,

and there are a lot of scholarly reasons

why John separates Luke and acts, and I'm not going to try to get into all that.

But Clint, I've gotta think

that it is striking that the last words you get

before you switch from the stories of Jesus and His ministry to the

to the story of the church in its work is this very statement here

that that this is just

a small selection of all the things that could be told.

There is a way in which I think this statement,

almost from the composition of the New Testament,

it summarizes the Gospels that came before in a beautiful way.

I'm not saying that's the primary reason for it.

There's there was a lot of reasons, but but it is poetic.

It is beautiful.

I would even go so far as to say

that this is the the marker that ends the stories of the Gospels.

The good news is what gospel means, the good news of Jesus Christ.

These are the last words.

Now the next words you're going to turn to are going to be the words of acts

where we see how that good news reshapes the world which receives it.

And this is an a beautiful way of, I think, bringing summary

to all of this book and all that which has come before.

Yeah, I think in the next couple of days we'll spend a little time

reflecting on the Gospel of John as a whole.

You know, we've tried to break it down

and passage by passage and piece by piece as we've gone through.

But I think now that we're at the end, maybe some thoughts on the gospel

as a whole and its place in Christian life, what John has meant to the church

and to the Bible, to Christian theology and thinking

and our understanding of how John has shaped our understanding of Jesus

in some really significant and in some ways, some very specific ways.

We want to take this moment here to just say thank you, Clint.

We are aware

that there are people who have listened to every single one of these studies,

but while we've been recording them and also after.

So no matter when you've given your time and attention to this book, thank you

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We are glad for the time that we get to spend together

and we will see you all as we move to conclusion tomorrow.

Thanks, everybody.