John was so intimate with Jesus
that he apparently even laid his head on Jesus' chest during the last
supper, without anybody considering it strange, or, if they did, John
didn't seem to care much about it. He was absolutely loyal to Jesus.
More so than Peter, whose loyalty at first didn't prove to be any
deeper than words.
John was the only disciple of
Jesus mentioned at the crucifixion - it says of the others that they
all fled - and consequently (?) he was also the only disciple who
didn't die a martyr's death.
And yet, as much as most of us
admire John or wish we were like him, he wasn't perfect. But he is the
disciple who told us that although no one is perfect, one day we will
be, because by God's grace and through Jesus' sacrifice, we are going
to be like Him.
John also revealed to us the
simple essence of God in three simple words, consisting of altogether
of 9 letters: "God is Love." Grasping that childlike truth puts things
into perspective for us and shows us that God doesn't care about our
religiosity, nor even our pious works, church attendance, or whatever
we try to do for God in our own strength, but whether we love Him, and
if we do, prove so by loving one another.
Although Matthew and Paul give
us further verification of those all-important principles, it's
probably primarily thanks to John and his having been around at the
right time and place, that we can grasp this most important of all
truths about the essence of God.
No one seems to bring home the
point of Who Jesus really was - or is - as well as he did, either, as
he goes back to the beginning of the Holy Scriptures as he starts out
his personal account of his time following the Lamb of God around on
earth with the words, "In the beginning…"
Roughly 4000 years after
creation (according to the biblical timeline), John gives us another
aspect of what happened "in the beginning." We see that God Almighty
was not alone, or even if they were Two, in Whose image(s) man were
created male and female (Gen.1:27), there was a Third, Who "was in the
beginning with God, and Who was God" (John 1:1,2). In fact, John
states, that it was He, the Son of God Father and Mother, by Whom all
things created. They left creating this place up to Junior, as He spoke
the universe into being, according to John, and when He finally became
flesh and lived among us, it was apparently an experience that would
change everything, both for Him and us!
John told us not only what God
is, but He also told us Who God is: the great sacrilege and blasphemy
for which His enemies killed Him was that Jesus of Nazareth was
actually the very Son of God, the One with God from the beginning,
equal with God.
John tells us that in Him, the
Word, the logos, lies all the information we need to come to God, and
if we stick to His Word, the information He gives us, then that
information will make us free, and it will cause God - both, the Father
and the Son - to live in us and empower us to do the humanly impossible.
If there ever was, is, or will be a way out of the Matrix, this is it.
