John 1 — #5
Hello Lightworkers, who understand mysteries, and what it’s like to mystify others. Some of you, my spiritual friends, tell me that you feel as if you belong to an exclusive club. The mainstream does not understand your spiritual gifts. Yet, when you meet someone who does “get” you, it is like you are family. There is a soul resonance.
The Gospel of John portrays this predicament through the literary device of riddles. Some people do “get” who Jesus is, as a divine being, while the majority do not. The life of God mystifies the mainstream.
From the start in the Gospel of John, chapter 1, while John the Baptist announces that the “true light” is coming into the world, there is a mystery about Jesus’s identity. Who would imagine that the “true light” could be a person? We learn later (1:45; v. 49) that this “true light” is Jesus of Nazareth.
A group of disciples, like John the Baptist and Nathanael, do recognize Jesus’s identity — they are like an exclusive soul-club.
John keeps going the mystery of Jesus’s identity. In chapter 2, at a wedding feast, the guests run out of wine. To everybody’s surprise, Jesus manages to perform a miracle by turning water into wine. Only Jesus’s mother (John 2:5) recognizes, in advance, that her son, Jesus, has superhuman powers. He can work “signs”, i.e. miracles.
John keeps the riddle of Jesus’s identity going throughout the book—teasing us, in a sense, so that we ask of Jesus – just as Jesus’s townsfolk did – “Is this really Joseph’s son?” (John 6:42) In other words: is he really a human being? or somehow mightier than that?
In spiritual life and literature, riddles bypass the mind, appealing directly to the heart or spirit, since the mind cannot figure out a riddle. John’s Gospel is full of riddles, which can pull us into the life of the Spirit, beyond logic and reason.
Consider: What’s the function of riddles? Something that looks like it means one thing, only to turn and twist so that it means something else?
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