The Feast of St. John the Apostle, Tuesday, December 27, 2022

John 20, 1–8

On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we do not know where they put him.” So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in. When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed.

The “other disciple” is understood to be John the Apostle and the writer of this Gospel.  John and Peter were known to belong to the innermost group of the Apostles, witnessing events in the life of Jesus to which the other Apostles were not privy.  Later, we seem them acting together in the Acts of the Apostles in the healing of a crippled beggar.  John takes part in the action of the Gospel but he writes of himself as “the other disciple” or “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, not using his name out of a sense of modesty.

John was a young man at the time he began to attend the preaching of St. John the Baptist, perhaps no more than fifteen or sixteen, the son of Zebedee and the younger brother of James.  His age can be estimated because he was not married when the Lord called him to be an Apostle, and we can say this because he was working with his father as a fisherman.  If he had been married, he would have had his own boat  so as better to support his family.  This also accords with tradition, which counts him as the youngest of the Apostles.  The Lord recognized his zeal and perhaps also a certain excitability, calling him and his brother James “the sons of thunder”.  St. Mark gives us reason for this by describing their desire to call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan town which forbade them entrance of their way to Jerusalem.  Perhaps this mixture of zeal, excitability, and innocence is what drew the Lord especially to him in friendship.  The love between the two men shows most in John’s presence beneath the Cross, and in the Lord’s entrusting his Mother to his care.

Following Pentecost, John remained for some years in Jerusalem.  His acquaintance with the city shows itself in the precise details he gives of it in his Gospel, details which in some cases were proven to be accurate through archaeological discoveries.  A Galilean would only know about these things if he had spent much time in Jerusalem.  In fact, his familiarity with the city and its people as well as the focus he put on the Lord’s preaching in the city in his Gospel make it plain that the Gospel was written for Judean Christians.  Although tradition tells us that John wrote his Gospel late in his life — as late as twenty years after the city fell to the Romans — it would seem that he wrote it before that time.  When he writes of the deeds Jesus performs in the city, he tells us just where he performed them or where he preached, as though to guide people to these places, which would have made no sense of these places no longer existed.  And if he had written either long after the city was destroyed or for Gentile Christians, there would have been no need for him to speak so specifically about places and times.

After writing his Gospel, he moved on to Asia Minor to spread the Gospel.  He is associated with the city of Ephesus, seemingly years after Paul had spent time there.  It was there that he wrote his three Letters.  It was on the island of Patmos, off the coast or .Asia Minor, that he experienced the visions which he set down in the book we call that of Revelation, or as the Apocalypse.  In the book he speaks of being exiled there for his preaching the word of God.  He is said to be the last of the Apostles to die, and if he were fifteen or sixteen in 30 A.D., he could have lived into the 90’s as tradition also hands down to us.  He is supposed to be the only one of the Apostles to die naturally.

We give thanks to God for the writings and the holy example of this man and pray that we may know Christ crucified so as to know him in the glory of his Resurrection, as John did.