JOHN “THE APOSTLE OF LOVE”

Hugo McCord

Zebedee, a professional fisherman of Galilee (Matthew 4:21), and Salome his wife (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40), named a son “John” (Yoannes, meaning “Yah is gracious,” “Jehovah shows favor.” Their naming their son “John” shows clearly that they were rejoicing that the Lord had blessed their family by giving them this baby.

Their naming their son “John” says that they were “pro-life,” not “pro-choice.” To them their baby was not a “choice” but a “child.” They believed that all “children are the heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward,” “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 127:3; 139:14). Children are God’s workmanship, as David told the Lord 3000 years ago, “You created the organs inside of me, and you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Abortion is murder.

John did not get to go to school, and grew up “uneducated and untrained” (Acts 4:13). He worked as a fisherman along with his father and brother James (Matthew 4:21). The Lord could use an educated man like Paul, brought up “at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3), but he could also use uneducated, ordinary people in the work of saving souls (Acts 4:13; Matthew 4:22).

One day Jesus was “walking by the sea of Galilee” (Matthew 4:18), and he saw the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, in a boat “mending their fishing nets, and he called them” to become “fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19-22). Immediately they “left the boat and their father, and followed” Jesus.

On the surface, what those two brothers did immediately seems irresponsible and foolish. Normally, men at their regular daily work as fishermen, seeing an itinerant preacher standing on the shore, and hearing his invitation, “Come after me and I will make you fishers of men” (cf. Matthew 4:19), would have ignored what they had heard, and go right on “mending their” fishing nets.

But that surface meaning disappears with more information. Jesus already was acquainted with these men, and recognized them as “disciples” of John the Baptist (baptistes, “baptizer,” Matthew 3:1; John 1:35). For some reason, those fishermen, and Jesus too, previously had traveled some 60 miles south from the sea of Galilee, down close to the Dead Sea, to an area called “Bethabara beyond the Jordan” (John 1:28-42; 3:26; 10:40). There John the immerser was baptizing sinners for the remission of their sins (Mark 1:4).

John the immerser was “a man sent from God” to be the forerunner for Jesus (Matthew 3:11; John 1:29-31). Anyone who refused to be baptized by John “rejected the counsel of God against” himself, “not submitting to his baptism” (Luke 7:30). Since James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were later selected by Jesus to be two of his twelve apostles (Matthew 10:2), we know that the sons of Zebedee, James and John, were baptized by John, because Jesus would not have selected them as apostles if they had refused John’s baptism.

One day “John the Baptist” (Matthew 3:1) was standing with two of his disciples, and when he saw Jesus walking, he said, “Behold! The Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw that they were following, and he asked, “What do you want?” They answered, “Rabbi (which means “Teacher”), where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see.”

They went and saw where he was staying, and they continued with him that day; it was about four in the afternoon. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard John speaking, and followed Jesus. He first found his own brother Simon, and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means “Christ”). He brought him to Jesus, who looked at him, and said, “You are Simon, the son of Jonah; you will be called Cephas” (which means “Peter”). (John 1:35-40.) The other “of the two who heard John speaking” is believed to have been John the son of Zebedee, the author of the Gospel of John, but did not write in his own name as the other disciple who went with Andrew to spend some time with Jesus.

This background makes sensible the later visit at the sea of Galilee when Jesus asked four fishermen, Andrew, Simon, James and John, whom he already knew, to become full-time preachers, and they immediately left their fishing boats and followed Jesus (Matthew 4:18-22; Mark 1:16-20). Later, after Jesus had spent a whole night in prayer, these four ex-fishermen were selected to be apostles (Luke 6:12-16).

The two sons of Zebedee Jesus “surnamed ‘Boanerges,’ that is, ‘Sons of Thunder’“ (Mark 3:17). On one occasion they exhibited thunder. The people of a certain village did not want Jesus to come into their town. When James and John “saw this,” they said to Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and consume them, as Elijah did?” (Luke 9:54). According to Greek manuscripts D and K, Jesus

turned and rebuked them, saying, “You do not know of what spirit you are, for the Son of man came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:55).

Jesus did not like the “thunder” in James and John.

Jesus not only sent the twelve apostles throughout Palestine “by twos” (Mark 6:7-13; Matthew 10:5-42) to announce his coming kingdom, his church (Matthew 16:18-19), but also he sent many other disciples, including 72 of them “by twos,” and gave them miraculous powers to heal “the sick, raise the dead, cure lepers, [and to] expel demons (Matthew 10:8; Luke 10:1-20).

It is not surprising that the apostle John was not acquainted with all of them, but it is surprising that John tried to stop the preaching of one of those whom Jesus had sent because he was not “following us”--the twelve apostles (Luke 9:49-50; Mark 9:38-40). Jesus had to correct John, saying,

Do not forbid him, for no one doing a miracle in my name can quickly speak evil of me. He who is not against us is for us (Mark 9:39).

This incident displays jealousy in John’s heart, wanting the miraculous powers that Jesus had given to him and the other apostles to be confined to the apostles. He did not like for those powers to be given to 72 plus disciples.

It is not surprising that Salome, the mother of James and John (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40), was proud of her two preaching sons, but she went too far with motherly love (Matthew 20:20-28). She asked Jesus to give James and John more honor in his coming kingdom than the honor given to the other ten apostles (Matthew 20:21). James and John also made the same request (Mark 10:35-45). It is no wonder that the other ten apostles, when they heard about the selfish request of James and John to be put ahead of them, became “angry at James and John” (Matthew 20:24; Mark 10:41).

Despite these character defects in John, Jesus loved him. Though Jesus loved all twelve of the apostles (John 13:1), he had a special love for John (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20), and allowed him to lean back on his breast at the last supper (John 13:23; 21:20).

After the last supper, Jesus led the eleven apostles “out to the mount of Olives” and said to them,

Tonight all of you will be offended at me, as it is written, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered” (Matthew 26:30-31; Zechariah 13:7).

The “all of you” included John, and in the garden of Gethsemane, while Jesus was praying alone, John and James and Peter all went to sleep (Matthew 26:36-46). When Judas led a mob with “swords and clubs” to seize Jesus, then all of the apostles, including John, deserted Jesus and “ran away” (Matthew 26:27-56; Luke 22:47-53; Mark 14:43-52).

However, at the crucifixion, John, the disciple for whom Jesus had a special love, was the only apostle to stand by the cross. While Jesus was in agony, he saw John standing by Mary his mother, and asked him to consider Mary as his mother, and he asked Mary to consider John as her son (John 19:26-27). Beautiful was John’s reaction: “The disciple took her to his own home from that hour” (John 19:27).

In John’s later years he is believed to have served as an elder (cf. 2 John 1; 3 John 1) at Ephesus. In 93 A.D., because John refused to say Kaisar Kurios, “Caesar is Lord,” to a local magistrate representing Emperor Domitian, John was banished to the island of Patmos, 70 miles southwest of Ephesus (Barclay). Exile was “preceded by scourging,” and was marked by “fetters, scanty clothing, insufficient food, sleep on the bare ground, a dark prison, work under the lash of the military overseer” (Sir William Ramsey, apud Barclay).

Tourists today are shown “John’s Grotto,” a cave in a cliff, 40 X 17 X 10 feet, where John was forced to live. Down close to the wharf are the stone remains of what could have been a baptistery. A plaque has an inscription written in Greek: leipsanon baptisteriou euangelistou Yoannou, tou theologou. A translation is: “That which is left of the baptistry of the evangelist John, the theologian,” an indication that John did some evangelistic work while on Patmos.

Apparently some of the book of Revelation was written while John was on the island of Patmos, for he wrote

When the seven thunders uttered their voices, I was about to write, and I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Seal up the things which the seven thunders uttered, and do not write them” (Revelation 10:4).

“After the death of the tyrant [Domitian, in 96 A.D.] he [John] returned to Ephesus” (Clement of Alexander, writing about 170 A.D.). John was released by the next emperor, Nerva, in 96 A.D. Back at Ephesus he finished the book of Revelation:

I, John, your brother and sharer in the distress and kingdom and steadfastness in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos for God’s message and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day (Revelation 1:9-10).

Two years later (98 A.D.) the senile apostle was still trying to preach, sitting in a chair, and repeating over and over, “Children, love one another.” John is often referred to as “the apostle of love.” Someone counted the times that a form of the Greek word for love (agape) is found in John’s five New Testament books, finding more than 50 occurrences. The last words of his last book are: “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). He was buried in Ephesus in 98 A.D.

A small church was built over his tomb in the second century. Theodosius built a larger church in the fourth century and it was followed by the Emperor Justinian’s great Basilica of St. John in the sixth century. Justinian’s church was among the largest and most magnificent anywhere in the Christian world. It was 394 feet long, 131 feet wide, and had 11 domes, and was built over John’s grave (Bill Humble, GOSPEL ADVOCATE, March, 1993).

The Lord used John to write five books. The word estin, a present tense form, in John 5:2, points to a pre-70 A.D. date for the writing of the Gospel of John. Probably First, Second, and Third John were written about 85 A.D., and Revelation was completed in 96 A.D.

If Jesus could use a man of lowly occupation (Matthew 4:18), a man “unschooled and untrained” (Acts 4:13), a man who showed selfish ambition on one occasion (Mark 9:35-45), and jealousy on another occasion (Mark 9:38-40), a man who had to overcome being a “son of thunder” (Mark 3:17), there is no one he cannot use in his holy work of saving “the lost” (Luke 19:10). Every human being, if he wants to be, can be a disciple whom Jesus loves and can lean on Jesus’ breast (John 13:23).

9-2-99