Love, the Lamb and Our Lady: Three Themes in Gospel, Epistles and Apocalypse of St. John

It would have been from Ephesus that St. John would have written at least four of the five Biblical books ascribed to him: the Gospel and three epistles. The epistles of St. John are among the shortest in the Bible and they are not addressed to any specific person or group, like those of St. Paul were. For this reason, they called Catholic or universal epistles. Although modern, especially secular, scholarship argues that the epistles, Gospel and Apocalypse were all written by different people and that none of these were actually the apostle John, son of Zebedee; there are themes which go through all the Johannine literature, which point to the corpus having the same author.

God is Love

The epistles of St. John contain beautiful meditations and exhortations on the centrality of love to the Gospel. Most notably, it is in these epistles where God is described as love, that anyone who does not love is not of God and “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear” (I John 4:7-21). This should be no surprise as it in the Gospel according to St. John that Our Lord delivers his mandatum: “Love one another as I have loved you” (13:54) and states “Greater love has no man than this; that a man lay down his life for his friends” (15:13). These words must have had a profound effect on St. John, even more than his apostolic brethren, since he heard them while sitting next to Our Lord and resting his head on His breast.

The Lamb of God

Two figures that emerge in both the Gospel according to St. John and his Apocalypse are the Woman and the Lamb. Although Our Lord is the Logos (Word) in the Prologue to the Gospel, the first words that are spoken to describe Our Lord in the Gospel by St. John the Baptist are “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!” (John 1:29) This is so important that the Baptist repeats the description twice and it is clearly a theme that runs through the whole Gospel, as is clearly seen in the St. John’s Passion Narrative.

St. John does not include an institution narrative in his record of the Last Supper. The Synoptic Gospels describe the Last Supper as a Paschal meal (although there is no mention of a lamb being eaten). For St. John, Our Lord is the Lamb of God, the new Paschal Lamb so he makes a point of stating that Our Lord was condemned around noon (the sixth hour), which was the time that the priests started sacrificing the Paschal lambs in the Temple during the Second Temple period. Moreover, while the Synoptics indicate that Simon of Cyrene helped Our Lord to carry His Cross, in St. John’s account Our Lord carries the Cross Himself to Golgotha, just as Isaac carried the wood upon which he was to be sacrificed up the hill of Moriah himself. St. John is also the one who points out that, unlike the thieves with whom He was crucified, Our Lord did not have His bones broken. The prophecy that St. John claims to be fulfilled by this event is the instruction given by Moses concerning the Paschal Lamb: “Not a bone of it shall be broken.” (Exodus 12:26). Moreover, St. John is the only evangelist who records Our Lord saying “I thirst” from the Cross. The soldiers offer Jesus some vinegar (most likely posca, a fermented drink favored by Roman soldiers because it was cheap) in response with a sponge placed on a sprig of hyssop (19:29). This seems odd, until one recalls that on the night of Pesach (Passover) the Israelites spread the blood of the Paschal Lamb on the lintels and doorposts of their homes with a sprig of hyssop. (Exodus 12:21).

The first three chapters of the Apocalypse contain a vision that St. John receives of Our Lord, Jesus Christ followed by a mission to the seven churches in the province of Asia (what is now Turkey, mostly). Although St. John was bishop of Ephesus, it is likely he had authority over the other churches to whom Our Lord tells him to write as well, perhaps similar to the authority an archbishop might have over the suffragan sees in his province. Alternatively, he could have been in a situation similar to modern dioceses spread over a large geographic area, where the see was in Ephesus but he had ordained presbyters to lead the churches in the surrounding cities.

At any rate, after his vision of Our Lord, who tells him to “write down what you see” (1:19), St. John is granted a vision of the Heavenly worship. In Heaven, Christ is never described as He appears to St. John initially, but rather as the Lamb. The Lamb is described as “standing, as though it had been slain” (5:6) and “Worthy…to take the scroll and to open its seals, for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God” (5:9) This Lamb is obviously Christ, as St. John later describes the foundations of the Heavenly Jerusalem as inscribed with the “names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (21:14)

The Woman

In the final verse of the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse, St. John has a vision of the Ark of the Covenant in God’s Heavenly temple. In the very next verse, he describes a “Woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1) This Woman is obviously Our Lady, as she is seen to be pregnant and after her Son, “who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron” (12:5) is born, He is caught up to God and His throne. Interestingly, in the Gospel according to St. John, Our Lady is never referred to by name. At both Cana and Calvary, St. John calls her simply “the Mother of Jesus” and Our Lord calls her “Woman.”

This sounds like disrespect to modern ears, but it is an acknowledgment of Our Lady’s role in salvation history. Eve, the mother of all the living, was not given that name until after the Fall, before which she was simply “the woman.” Whereas Eve faced a serpent and lost, bringing sin into the world; the New Eve, Our Blessed Mother, is shown in the Apocalypse standing against a dragon “that ancient serpent, called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (12:9) and brought the remedy to sin into the world, herself being sinless. Moreover, while Eve reached out her hand in the Garden and took the fruit from the tree our Blessed Mother allowed the fruit of her womb to be placed on a tree (the Cross) in a garden. (The Gospel according to St. John states that there was a garden in the place where Our Lord was crucified.)