The Gospel of John

Part 3, Eternal Life

In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus talks a great deal about "the kingdom of God." 

The Gospel of John, though, is different.  "The kingdom of God" doesn't feature prominently in John, the way it is a centerpiece in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

The "kingdom of God" is only mentioned in two narratives in John. The first narrative is Jesus' conversation at night with Nicodemus. Jesus says to Nicodemus:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

The second narrative where the kingdom is mentioned is when Jesus is standing on trial before Pilate:

“My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

Both of these passages feature John's cosmological dualisms. Nicodemus can't understand Jesus when he speaks of "earthly" things, so how can he understand when Jesus speaks of "heavenly" things? Before Pilate, we see another example of how "the world" is used as a negative contrast: "My kingdom is not of this world." 

There's also a strong "spiritualizing" aspect to both of these discussions of the kingdom. Jesus tells Nicodemus that if you want to enter the kingdom of God you must be "born of the Spirit." And when Jesus points Pilate to the fact that his kingdom is "not of this world" he does so to explain why his followers are not fighting to liberate him. Both of these discussions of the kingdom shift your imagination away from the political to the cosmological.

So, if John doesn't point to the kingdom as the central focus of Jesus' mission, what does Jesus speak about?

Scholars have argued that in the Gospel of John "eternal life" stands in for "the kingdom of God" in the Synoptics. Where "kingdom of God" is only mentioned four times in John, "eternal life" is mentioned 18 times. Some examples:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (3.16) 

"Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (4.13-14) 

"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life." (5.24) 

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. (6.27) 

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. (6.47) 

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. (6.54) 

I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. (10.28) 

And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (17.3)

Critical to understanding what John means by "eternal life" is to note that "eternal life," as you can see in the passages above, is experienced by the believer here and now. "Eternal life" in John doesn't mean "heaven." Well, it does mean heaven, but it means more than heaven. It means heaven then and heaven now.

That "eternal life" is experienced and enjoyed here and now is how "eternal life" in John becomes a parallel concept to "the kingdom of God" in the Synoptics. But what does this mean? Recall the contrast from the last post between "horizontal" and "vertical" eschatologies. When we think of "eternal life" as "heaven" we have a horizontal timeline in mind: eternal life (heaven) is in the future. But as we've seen, John's cosmology and eschatology is vertical, earthly life and "eternal life" are realities that exist, in parallel or superimposed, at this very moment. Faith in Jesus can move you, right now, from earthly life into eternal life. As Jesus succinctly says, whoever believes in him "moves from death to life."

For most of us, the word "eternal" sounds like a temporal quantity, which puts us back into a horizontal timeline imagination. Eternal means on and on and on. A timeline that never ends. And no doubt, that is a part of what "eternal" could mean. But in John, given its vertical cosmology and eschatology, the word "eternal" is less a quantity than a quality, a quality of life that becomes available to us here and now in this life. The kingdom of heaven coming to us, in Synoptic imagery, here and now on earth. Born again of the Spirit, followers of Jesus exist in two dimensions simultaneously, earthly and eternal.