Mission Priority from the Gospel of John
By David Zadok, LCJE Area Coordinator for Israel
All of us involved with Jewish missions are very familiar with Paul’s words in Romans 1:16. For many of us this is a God given priority and mandate for our call to take the Good News of Jesus to our blood brothers.
The Gospel of John is different from the Synoptic Gospels in many ways. In the first place, it includes narratives and events that are mentioned only in the Fourth Gospel, while some of those recorded in the synoptics are not mentioned by John. Secondly, some of the main themes in the synoptic gospels are completely missing from the Gospel of John (i.e. temptations of Jesus, the transfiguration, the institution of the Lord’s Supper). But John’s Gospel is also different because he often uses Jewish feasts to set the background and the time of his narratives. John begins his Gospel with the words “In the beginning”, the same words used by the Septuagint in Genesis 1:1 . While there is certainly continuity and discontinuity between the Old and the New Testaments, it seems as if John is more concerned to ensure that his Jewish audience will recognize that this is not a new teaching and message that he is bringing but a familiar and old one (1 John 2:7).
John structures his Gospel very carefully with the aim that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing we may have life in his name (20:31). Without going into the details of the structure of the whole gospel, there is an interesting treasure hidden in the structure of chapters three and four.
In chapter three John narrates the conversation of Jesus with Nicodemus. He introduces Nicodemus as “a man of Pharisees”, “a ruler of the Jews” (3:1). The conversation is full of Old Testament images, with which Nicodemus should have been familiar. The new birth from water and the Spirit, the ascending and descending of the Son of Man, the Serpent that Moses lifted up, should all have made Jesus’ point very clear to Nicodemus. This obviously was not the case as we see by the type of questions that Nicodemus asks.
The well-known verse, John 3:16, comes at the end of the conversation with Nicodemus, though commentators have a hard time determining when the dialog with Nicodemus ends, and when the public is being addressed. This is particularly true as the first “you” in verse 11 (truly, truly I say to you) is singular, but the second “you” in the verse, (but you do not receive our testimony) is plural. But, more importantly, the following chapter begins with the conversation between Jesus and a Samaritan woman, following which many from her town come to faith.
Does John emphasize Jesus’ priority in mission, by recording the conversation with Nicodemus the Jew first, and then John 3:16 and from there to the Samaritans? Can it be that John, who introduces Jesus in the first chapter as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:30), also gives us the order of priority in world mission? After all, the world at that time was basically made of "Jews" and "everybody else". John, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, puts this most known and famous verse, namely John 3:16, right in between the conversations with a Jew first and then a Samaritan.
If this is the case, perhaps Romans 1:16 and Acts 1:8 are not the only places in the New Testament that emphasize the priority of the mission to the Jews.
David Zadok
David@ha-gefen.org.il