Is God for everyone? And if so, what is the vehicle for this?
One of the great contentions in Christianity is dealing with universality — is Jesus here to save everyone or some — and scripture is conflicted on this.
As debates go, this one is a bit obtuse. People pretending to be literal while ignoring other literal interpretations. We ought to show more fidelity to the text.
We’re reading the gospel we call John in the lectionary these days, and this evangelist takes great pains to argue that it isn’t everyone who is drawn to God ultimately, but it is, as he says in chapter seven, all who are thirsty.
Much like other statements like the ones about sheep and the gate, Jesus seems to be arguing for a “some” metaphysic. That the point isn’t for God to redeem everyone, but some. The elect perhaps. I get it, yeah, but he also said in the same gospel that he came to redeem the whole world.
The paradox the gospel of John reflects (and even engenders!) is one not for the strident or bureaucratic, but for the reflective and conflicted. It specifically fosters both lines of thinking — that Jesus is about saving the world, all of it, and that it is about a portion of the whole, specifically the ones who want it.
The real question for readers of the gospel is not which one is correct, but what is the intent of holding both in tension together?
In the section of John where Jesus talks about the sheep and the gate, he describes himself as the way to get in, but that the gate is wide open — you just have to walk in. This, he says, is also his work, as he leads the sheep out through the gate and protects them from the people seeking to climb the fence and break in. It is a complex, shifting, and confounding image.
And yet my experience with it is as an attempt to speak to two dimension of the issue at once, rather than pretend it is all the same. And this, I think is why Jesus seems to be arguing for a paradox rather than the clean, literal reading so often on offer.
So Jesus does think the purpose is a redemption of the world. AND. Some people don’t want redeeming, so Jesus is for the willingly redeemed. These two are not opposites, but reflect two different layers placed upon the reality. It is a bit like contingent thinking. Like when we say, I want us to be at peace AND we’ll have a standing army just in case. While many pacifists will argue that the maintaining of a standing army compromises one’s willingness to be at peace, many see little trouble with speaking of peacetime and wartime within a self-described realistic framework.
In short, it isn’t paradox, it’s ambivalence. Jesus believe in both strongly.
The image Jesus uses for human desire in this week’s gospel is thirstiness, which is connected with seeking out being sated. It is not unlike the sheep seeking out the shepherd or wanting to come through the gate. And Jesus, the one with access to the living water, is more than just positioned to help, he is intrinsically linked to the process.
This, too, inspires a lot of questions, but these often get in the way of how relational this is, and just how much Jesus reflects our needs and our desires.
The images, like the trinity itself, is relational. Which is what Jesus seems most interested in from his followers.