Word and Mission: an exploration of the Word in John's Gospel and contemporary mission.

Revd Dr Caroline Wickens is a Methodist minister who has been tutor in Biblical Studies at theological Colleges in Zambia and Kenya. Currently she is on the staff of the Southern Theological Education and Training Scheme based in Salisbury.

This is a shortened version of her address to the Conference. The full text can be found on the 'Rethinking Mission' website.

I was very pleased to be asked to explore how our modern mission emphases are rooted in the Bible. I decided to focus on John's Gospel and specifically on the notion of Word which runs throughout the Gospel.

'In the beginning was the Word'. John sees the Word as fundamental to God's mission . The spoken world reflects God's spoken word, God's identity. But we can know God far more fully through the definitive word that took flesh and came to pitch his tent among us (John 1:14).

Translating the Word

John's use of the concept of Word is profoundly helpful in enabling us to think about what we mean by God's mission, and how we in the church share in that mission. What we mean when we talk about 'word' is a sound that conveys meaning within a particular language.

Authentic theology only becomes possible when you recognise the importance of your environment in conditioning the way you think. Translation is easy to get wrong. You can produce a translation using the exact equivalent in the destination language, regardless of whether your translation makes sense to its readers. Or you can look for words and phrases that convey the underlying ideas effectively; this tends to produce a translation that is much more accessible to its hearers. For instance some African students of Greek were trying to convey the sense of Jesus' statement that Herod is a fox (Luke 13:32). The Kikuyu students had no problem; for them, a fox was greedy and cunning. But there were also two from Sudan, for whom a fox was brave and clever. For them, Herod ended up being a vulture.

Though more satisfactory in conveying meaning this process is much more challenging, requiring us to leave behind our ingrained ideas about which words are suitable to convey the meaning of the Gospel. This kind of translation of the Word puts the initiative and the control firmly in the hands of the intended audience; it demands trust and a willingness to let the Spirit of God guide the process.

One of the major insights of modern missionary thinking is that we need to let go of the Gospel so that it can take root in new cultural contexts. The process of translation, of inculturation, needs great care to enable the Gospel to be spoken in a new language in the right way, to enable new participants to find ways of speaking about God that enable them to live the Gospel authentically within their own context. John's image of the Word made flesh is of total, unlimited inculturation.

Word and Conversation

Word implies conversation. We talk to each other, thrashing out our ideas in dialogue and seeking mutual understanding. So it is with the Word of God.

John 3 recounts Jesus' meeting with Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, while chapter 4 tells of his conversation with a nameless Samaritan woman. The two dialogue partners contrast with each other. He is an important member of society; she is less than insignificant. We would expect the conversation with him to be a success and with her to end in failure of understanding.

Nicodemus is invited to reflect with Jesus on the idea of rebirth in water and the Spirit; but he insists on remaining at the level of literal understanding – 'can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?' (3:4) His part in the conversation ends with the confused words, 'how can these things be?'

With the Samaritan woman Jesus begins by asking for a drink. He then moves on to introduce the idea of living water. The woman gradually moves towards the realisation that Jesus’ words have meanings beyond the everyday. Her questions initially reflect doubt - but then she moves on to a more open response. 'Sir, give me this water'. She doesn't yet understand fully what she is offered, but her openness creates the conditions in which Jesus can help her move on to the amazing moment when he reveals himself to her as Messiah. She then rushes off to tell her people - a first evangelist. The means to achieve this is open, sensitive and developing dialogue.

It is part of the wonder of the Incarnation that Jesus, the Word of God, is willing and able to speak to us as one of us, respecting our views. He presents his point of view without asserting authority or seeking to dominate, listening and responding sensitively to the views of his partners in dialogue.

The Word is established through conversation, dialogue and sharing; Jesus does mission by talking to people he calls his friends, and he is very rapidly ready to hand on responsibility to his dialogue partners for taking the messge further.

Word as creative, transformative and liberative

John highlights the creative power of the Word in the ongoing process of life-giving transformation. It is in the story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11) that Martha declares, 'Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world'. That strong, passionate statement of belief creates the context in which Jesus will raise Lazarus from the dead. At the tomb Jesus prays and, in a moment of great tension and hope against hope, he shouts 'Lazarus, come out!' And it is precisely the word, that shouted command, which changes death into life.

The transformative power of God's word can renew people's lives where society has imposed deathly, death-dealing conditions. In Kenya, I met a woman who was HIV+. Diagnosed in the early days of the epidemic, she was immediately sent home from school. Her distraught mother shut her in a back room and left her there, waiting for her to die - until the pastor found out and came to see her. They talked about possible futures; and eventually she began to find ways of living positively. But it was the word, the conversations, which brought her back to life and created the opportunity for hope.

As people are empowered to hear the transformative word of God, so they find liberation from the things that oppress them. Consider John's account of the Resurrection (ch.20). Mary Magdalene is the first one to come to the tomb. She finds the stone moved and immediately leaps to the conclusion that someone has stolen the Lord's body. Overcome by grief, when she sees Jesus she is not able to recognise him – until he speaks her name. And that word, ‘Mary’, is a word of liberation at many levels. She is set free from her grief and anxiety, from her blindness about who Jesus really is and, importantly, from her status within a society that dictated very limited roles to women, so that she becomes 'an apostle to the apostles'. Liberation, as a central concept underpinning both theology and mission, is profoundly rooted in the Bible, as we have seen in the gospel of John.

The Word falls silent

John's discourse about the Cross is strikingly different from the three Synoptic Gospels. For John, this moment of Jesus' death is not a moment of shame or disgrace but of glory. In John's account of the Last Supper, we find over and over again the theme of glory, the glory of the Father and of the Son of Man revealed in Jesus' hour, (18:6,19:11,19:17, 19:26, 28). When he is ready, Jesus speaks his last word and then gives up his spirit (19:30). And what a last word: 'it is finished', one word in Greek, meaning 'it is accomplished', 'I have achieved it'. It's a statement of victory, not defeat.

What are we to make of this transposition of an agonising, humiliating death into a triumphant vindication of everything Jesus has said and done? Both John and Paul use the image of a grain of wheat as a metaphor for death and resurrection (1 Cor 15:37). If it falls into the ground and dies, then there is the possibility of new life. But there has to be the period of silence in between, when nothing seems to be happening at all. So it is for the Word of God. The whole New Testament suggests that the incarnate life of Jesus is a seed-life, creating the conditions necessary for the fulness of life in the Spirit that is to follow; and it is necessary for the life of the Word to lose its nature, to fall silent, so that the multilingual life of the Spirit can come alive for the disciples.

Falling silent. One of the people who had the most influence on my decision to offer for service overseas was an old lady, widow of a Methodist minister, former missionaries in China. When the Communists took over they had to leave, and for the best part of forty years there was silence. Then one day in the early 80s she received a letter in Chinese; the people they had worked with all those years before had finally felt safe enough to write and tell her that they had kept the faith through the years of oppression and danger; and now Christianity is a powerful, dynamic force in a rapidly changing country.

Many factors have silenced our mission work: political change, cultural change, economic necessity. There are often painful losses. John doesn't deny the pain; his Jesus is really dead (19:34). When the word becomes silent, it is a sign of completion, not defeat; a sign that the missio Dei is moving forward to a new stage. Sometimes it seems to take a long time for there to be any sign of change or growth. Nevertheless, for John, paradoxically, the silencing of the Word is the means to a new way of speaking through the power of the Spirit.

Silence leads to renewed speech. We are only just beginning to hear the outlines of that speech, renewed for our time, in mission that is genuinely local within a global conversation. But John was aware of the power of the silenced but renewed word from the time he recorded his Gospel: 'these things have been written that you may believe that he is the Messiah, the Son of God, and, believing, have life in his name' (20:31). And the heart of that mission is summed up in words from another text associated with John. ‘This is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that you should love one another (1 Jn 3:11).