Book Review: The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town

Searching for John's Jesus
A review of The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town
by Paul Louis Metzger

Paperback: Intervarsity Press, 2010


When an author compares the disciples at the Last Supper to a bunch of hobbits, it gets your attention. There were a lot of such attention-grabbing moments in Paul Metzger's new book, The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town. This is a book which references everything from Dirty Harry to McDonald's Filet-of-Fish sandwiches, all in the service of offering the message of the gospel of John to a contemporary world. The pop culture references were abundant. The evangelical mojo was working. Where, though, was John?

The Tolkien reference is a great case in point. As he discusses John 13, Metzger pulls in the hobbits to shed light on the transformational nature of Jesus' mission - taking people who thought they knew who they were and giving them a new identity.
Why does Tolkien choose a halfling--a hobbit--to bear the ring and not a warrior or a wizard? Because hobbits do not desire to rule the world. And most hobbits do not seek financial gain (except Bilbo's relatives, the Sackville-Bagginses, and we all know a few kin like them). Rather, they seek out fellowship and feasts and celebrations, kind of like Jesus. -- (p. 168)

So give me family feasts, foot washings, and farewell speeches with tax-collectors, zealots, fishermen and thunder's sons-turned-hobbits, as we leave the Shire all together. It's the only way to turn a he-man world upside down, as Jesus welcomes in his halfling kingdom made up of former he-men turned hobbits. -- (p. 171)

This is creative cross-pollination. It connects with an important cultural touchstone and speaks a language that will resonate with a people nurtured on Hollywood and You Tube fragments. It is combined with frequent hortatory language that lends the book a sermonic quality. There are countless places where we are told that "we should" or that "we must" do something as a response of faith. Metzger ties this to John by identifying the central message of the book as evangelical: "calling people to faith and confirming believers in faith" (21). But if the hobbits and other denizens of the book are surprising, the Jesus he points to is very familiar and perhaps more to be found in a particular strain of American evangelicalism than in the pages of John.

The Gospel of John is the first of the Resonate series of biblical commentaries, for which Metzger, a professor of Christian Theology at Multnomah Biblical Seminary, is the executive editor. The stated aim of the series is "to provide spiritual nourishment that is biblically and theologically orthodox and culturally significant" (12). Unlike traditional verse by verse commentaries, these volumes are intended to develop themes found in the biblical text in conversation with the culture.

It is good to keep this in mind because readers looking for traditional commentary material will be disappointed. Metzger does make some references to scholarly research into the gospel, but it is scant and usually confined to the endnotes. His approach is confessional and not at all cautious. He states at the front that he believes the apostle John, who was Jesus' disciple, wrote the book and also the other books credited to him. There is no discussion of a Johannine school, just as there are no extended excursuses on Greek philosophical influences or Greek translation issues. Metzger sees the gospel as all about proclaiming the Word and he wants his work to mirror that.

In the foreword, Leonard Sweet describes Metzger as inventing a "whole new genre of literature, a hybrid commentary where the best in biblical scholarship is coupled with theological reflection on the text that is accessible to the layperson" (10). This seems overly generous. Despite the many biblical citations in the book, John seems curiously absent from this commentary. We do not encounter the text in its strangeness nor with the expectation that we will discover a message that will surprise. Instead it is mediated (with novelty but sometimes tritely) through cultural references many contemporary people will know well and through traditional evangelical language that will strike many long-term Christians as boilerplate rhetoric.

At the end of each section what stays with the reader is a central image, like disciples as hobbits. But the strange and disturbing character of Jesus who haunts the gospel of John, with his cryptic language and mysterious actions, does not linger because, through Metzger's lens, he isn't much different from the illuminated Sallman painting of Jesus which hangs on the walls of so many Protestant churches throughout the land. I love hobbits. I just wish Metzger's Jesus was as intriguing.