Description
The Gospel of John is in a special way the Gospel of love and intimacy. It is the Gospel of “belovedness,” in which we are granted a particularly vivid insight into the immense love that God the Father has for his beloved Son, and (without any diminution!) for each one of us. The Son himself tells us at the Last Supper: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you” (Jn 15:9), which, if translated more accurately, would read: “With the very love with which the Father has loved me, so have I loved you,” meaning: “With the Father’s love, given first to me, I have loved you.” And he also soon adds: “The Father himself loves you” (16:27). During this supper, one of the disciples, the one “whom Jesus loved” (13:23), leans against the breast of Christ, reposing against his very bosom. This is a beautifully intimate moment, for at this meal Jesus opens his Heart vulnerably before those who are closest to him, before his Apostles. In their presence he addresses his heavenly Father in prayer, thereby drawing them into the ineffable bond of love and intimacy between the Father and the Son, with the breath of the Spirit ever passing between them in their ceaseless dialogue.
This book humbly seeks to offer an approach to the Word of God that is fueled entirely by receptivity, wonder-filled openness, and obedient docility…by the attitude of Mary, the first and fullest recipient of the Word of God given to humanity. Indeed, the reason that the Word of God, written over two-thousand years ago, can address us with full force today, with complete contemporaneity, is that it lives within the bosom of Mary-Church, the Mother and Bride in whom we are all conceived, born, and carried throughout this life unto the consummation of union with God in eternity. The Church, indeed, is the true recipient of Scripture, and also its custodian.
God birthed the Church from the opened side of Christ on the Cross and brought her fully to realization in the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, precisely so that we may never bear the terrible burden of reading and interpreting the word and will of God alone, in isolation. Rather, we find ourselves always already held in the certainty and expansiveness of the Church’s understanding of her Bridegroom, which she gives also to us to be our own. This certainty is the intimate knowledge that the Bride has of Bridegroom, indeed a participation in Christ’s own knowledge of himself and of the Father, entrusted to humanity and protected, preserved, and unfolded throughout history until the end of time. The Church is the subject of the word, the one whom God addresses; but she is also the one in whom and through whom God addresses us. Thus in letting our littleness be cradled in her immensity, our folly in her wisdom, our frail aspirations in her ardent desire, our weak fidelity in her perfect communion with God, we can be sure of “abiding in the truth” (2 and 3 Jn). We can discover confidence in having, ourselves, a deep and sure and constant communion with the living God, with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are pleased to communicate to us, in and through the Church in whom we are adopted and sheltered, a full participation in the intimacy of their own divine life.
In sum, my words in this book, born of “reading in and with the Church” (and thus being indebted to her for absolutely everything), seek to foster this disposition in the reader, creating a space, in the Garden of the Word and the Church, where, with light and playful and tender hearts, receptive in softness and malleable in surrender, we can receive anew the awesome mystery of God’s love given in Christ, and, rooted and found in this mystery with all love, may come to know the breadth and width and height and depth of the love of God, and be filled, yes, be filled with the utter fullness of God himself (cf. Eph 3:14-21).
