In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, one-to-one,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, one-to-one,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.

Of our four witnesses, John is the most distinctive of all. In the first three gospels we have clearly been offered views of the same landscape: from different viewpoints, with different interests in mind and in different terms -- but with landmarks and contours recognizably in common. At first sight John's gospel seems to depict a different continent, photographed through a quite different lens. We will look once more for such details of this "John" himself as might explain these contrasts; but yet again will find what we need within the texture of the book itself.

Mark, Matthew and Luke presented a rapid succession of incidents, of disputes and of short, sharp sayings by Jesus; in John we move to a stately series of set-piece miracles and long, spiralling discussions. Just five obvious "miracles" are described by John; only one of them, the feeding of 5,000 people in the desert, is clearly known to our other witnesses.

We might well wonder if the Jesus of our first three witnesses is recognisably the "same" as John's at all. We must follow John's lead: back to the very start of things and to the eternal "character" and plan of God, to the "Word" with which he designed and triggered all creation.

All things came to be through him;
and without him came to be not a single thing of all
that which had come to be.
In him was life;
and the life was the light of men.
And the light shines in the darkness;
and the darkness never overcame it.

For God spoke: Let there be light. And Jesus, claims John, was and is this very same Word, the perfect and total expression of God's will. We let the questions echo that John's community knew well, about the power of speech, about its limits - and about the deepest aspiration of all: To express to another, to one that we love, all that we think and believe and long for and are.

And the Word came to be flesh,
and set up his shelter among us.
And we saw his glory,
glory as of an only son from the Father,
full of kindness and truth.

We trace the intriguing strategy that shapes the first half of John's testimony. You may have wondered why we draw on the language of a court-room: witnesses, testimony and cross-examination. The idea is not original. The account of Jesus' trial before the local authorities is in John's gospel briskly told. For Jesus has been "on trial" from the story's start. He himself has been quizzed, witnesses examined, charges tested and refined. The whole gospel is one long, overarching trial. And who are the judges?

We, the readers, are invited to assess this Jesus, to hear his opponents' claims and his own, to make up our own minds on this defendant. It is in the last scenes of the gospel, as the wheels of Roman justice turn slowly but inexorably toward his execution, that the truth will become painfully clear: Of all the people in this court, one and one only is the real Judge. He is standing in the dock, the "defendant" mocked and belittled. And his verdict upon all those ranged around him hangs on just one decision of their own: their verdict on this Judge himself.

How were John's readers to grasp his claims? John has in view a function for his gospel so remarkable that modern readers can miss all sight of it. We can read his gospel scene by scene, savor John's more elaborate dialogs and fuller telling of the miracles -- but fail to see the movement into which he is inviting us and through which he offers, step by step, to lead us.

Each of our four witnesses believes his gospel's truths to be elusive, and his readers to need sustained and careful help if these truths are to be grasped. John's strategy is the bravest of all. He sees the majesty and depth of his task with a poet's eye: If his readers are to see what is there to be seen, they must be "re-born" -- and once they are re-born, they will see with all clarity what has made possible their rebirth.

In God's truth I tell you. Unless people are born again from above, they cannot see the kingdom of God.

Here is the only language to do justice to the process through which the readers must go -­ and through which John will steer them. John, poet and mystic is the midwife of this extraordinary new birth.

A cripple is healed. A blind man regains his sight. Jesus' own friend Lazarus is raised from the dead. Each of these stories tells of a single figure; each tells too of the reader. For it is the readers who are drawn through healing and sight to new life, and who hear the climactic command of Jesus echoing in their tomb:

Lazarus, come on out.

Only now are the readers ready to hear the dialog of Jesus and his closest friends, the long farewell on the night of his betrayal.

This Jesus dies in control of all that happens to him:

And there stood by Jesus' cross his mother and his mother's sister. So Jesus, seeing his mother and the pupil standing by whom he loved, says, Woman, look: there is your son.Then he says to the pupil: Look, there is your mother. And from that hour the pupil took her into his own home.

After this Jesus, knowing that everything was now finished, so that the Old Order might be brought to final completion, says: " am thirsty.

There was a vessel there, full of sour wine; so fixing a sponge full of the wine on a stick of hyssop they put it to his mouth.

When he had taken the wine Jesus said: It is completed. And bowing his head he handed over his breath.

What will John's readers see on their way to this re-birth and as its consequence? We have found in Mark the strange inversion of a well-known formula: "events" that belong in a vision of heaven acted out on earth. John pursues this possibility further still. The dreams of a world renewed are being fulfilled before our every eyes. All that Israel's worship hoped for ­- everything anticipated in her rites and festivals -- find their fulfilment in the person and mission of Jesus. The "true" Temple was not a building in Jerusalem; it was Jesus himself.

To do justice to his Jesus, John starts his gospel before the dawn of time, in the deepest counsels of God. Let there be light, said the God of The Beginning; and creation was under way, of day and night, land and sea, vegetation, animals -- and humankind. Adam was entrusted with the Garden of Eden, to tend it, to name its creatures, - and so to complete their creation. But a serpent spoiled the Garden; and into the garden where Jesus was came the traitor, a tool of Satan.

Everything, in John's mystical vision, comes full circle. At the moment of Jesus' death Jesus himself declares It is completed. That completion becomes clear as light rises on Easter morning. The "re-born" readers are shown the source of their re-birth. On Easter morning Mary Magdalen weeps outside the empty tomb. She turns and sees the "gardener." He calls her by her name. "Adam" and "Eve" are once more in Eden. No serpent lurks. All creation is made new.

No one has seen God, ever:
it is God the only son,
who is at the father's side,
that has made him known.