On Reading Well
What the Gospel of John Does to the Reader — If We Let It
**Saint Jerome in his Study Antonello da Messina
As I near my first-year PhD review, I’ve been unable to shake these ideas. So I’m writing them out, less as a finished essay than as a reflective account of what the past six months of research have been doing to me.
Here is the thing I keep returning to: learning to read well doesn’t come naturally; it’s genuinely hard work.
That might sound strange coming from someone whose entire research project is an exercise in close reading. But the longer I spend with the Gospel of John, the more convinced I am that reading well is one of the most demanding, counterintuitive things a modern person can do. Not because the text is obscure. Not because the language is elusive. But Scripture is designed to do something to the reader that we are almost entirely unprepared for. And most of the time, we read straight past it.
We live in an age of rapid consumption, half-baked attention, and overstimulation. Our attention has been fractured — not by laziness, but by the sheer volume of information competing for it at every moment. Articles. Newsletters. Threads. Reels. Even books are often read with a kind of productive efficiency: pick the book based on a good review, open it, read, retain the argument, finish, and move on. This is simply how most of us are taught to engage with literature — one act of information-gathering or entertainment after another. It creates habits of mind that, when brought to Scripture, do something quite unfortunate.
We begin to treat the Scriptures like any other content.
Think about how you read most books. You pick them up, move through them, and put them on a shelf. For most books, one reading is sufficient. In rare cases, we reread, and in truth, I’ve only reread a few: The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and a handful of cherished spiritual formation books.
The Bible refuses that posture. Not simply because we should approach it with more reverence, but because it is structurally designed to be returned to. To be reread, sat with, heard again at a different moment of life, and discovered to be saying something you somehow missed the last time. It is meditative, reflective literature, meant to be read over the course of an entire life, only to arrive at the end, and still leave more on the table.
And yet, as is the custom of our wonderful and flawed human nature, familiarity flattens. The very fact that we have read these texts before becomes an obstacle. We think we know what a passage says before we’ve actually read it today, with these eyes, in this season. The words trigger a memory of our last encounter with them (a significant sermon, a specific point someone made) and often we follow that memory rather than the text as it sits before us now.
So when I read John’s Gospel (dwelling in the bowels of research, up to my eyes in secondary reading, carrying along my developing framework) I am learning to practice something in tension: to simulate a first-time reading, while attempting to hold in mind everything I already know.
Narrative critics distinguish between reading time and story time — the difference between the experience of moving through a text for the first time and the retrospective knowledge that accumulates once you’ve seen how it ends.[1] Both are legitimate ways of engaging a narrative. But most of us, with a familiar text, have lost access to the first. We carry only the retrospective and import it on every encounter without realizing we’ve done so.
The Gospel of John is designed to be read from both positions simultaneously. When we read from only one, we are critically missing the other.
Here is where the research and this reflection meet.
When we open John, the first eighteen verses do something unusual. Before any character speaks, before any miracle occurs, before Jesus has said a word in the story, the narrator tells us exactly who Jesus is. He is the Logos, present at creation (1:1). He is the light darkness cannot overcome (1:5). He is the one who gives authority to become children of God to those who receive him (1:12). He is the Word become flesh, full of grace and truth (1:14), the one who makes the Father known (1:18).
The reader is handed the answer before the test begins.1
The effect is more brilliant than it first appears. In most narratives, the reader and the characters discover the world of the story together: positioned alongside one another, sharing uncertainty. This is the default style of modern storytelling, the reason narrative produces suspense and empathy, why it binds us to a life other than our own.
The Gospel of John breaks this mold from the first sentence.
We are lifted above the story and given a vantage point no character in the narrative possesses. We know who Jesus is before anyone in the Gospel does. John the Baptist bridges this gap for us, and then the narrative comes to life with a diverse cast of characters who each encounter Jesus and must experience this for themselves. Nicodemus wrestles with questions the reader has already had answered. The disciples misunderstand, again and again, the very things the Prologue told us plainly.
We are not watching a mystery unfold. We are watching people encounter a truth we already hold.
This is a costly narrative choice; it surrenders suspense entirely, and the Gospel makes it deliberately, because it is trying to produce something in the reader that suspense alone cannot accomplish. Rudolf Bultmann understood this with particular sharpness: Jesus’ words in this Gospel, he argued, are not didactic propositions to be understood and filed away. They are an invitation and a call to decision, and the decisive question in every encounter with the Revealer is whether or not a person will remain what they are.2 Jesus’ arrival does not simply inform. It divides. It affects what Bultmann calls a sunderance — a separation between faith and unbelief, sight and blindness — not reserved for some future cosmic judgment but enacted here, now, in human response to the Word made flesh standing right in front of them.
The Gospel is not merely asking us to discover who Jesus is. It is positioning us to watch what happens to human beings when they encounter Jesus, and whether they will remain what they are. It is not exploring the question of what is true, but rather what humans do with what is true.
And to explore that question, the writer positions us above the action, Prologue in hand, to descend into every encounter and sit in the gap between what we know and what the characters can see. That gap is one of the most wonderful, beautiful, and stupefying elements of the Gospel.
But here is what I’ve come to believe we miss, almost every time.
The gap is not merely a literary device, nor simply a technique for generating dramatic irony. It prompts us toward a spiritual posture the Gospel is deliberately cultivating in us and it requires something that modern reading habits have largely trained us out of.
It requires us to slow down and feel the weight diverse responses: belief, rejection, non-recognition, unresolved tension.
When we read quickly and efficiently, focused on gaining more information, we rob the gap of its power. We see Nicodemus ask how can these things be? (3:9), nod because we know the answer, and move on. We see Philip say Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us (14:8), wince at his failure, gaze down at him in judgment, and move on. We struggle to sit with these characters long enough to feel what they feel, rarely let their confusion press on us, leaving the harder questions unasked: how could he be with Jesus this whole time and still not get it? How might I still not get it?
The Gospel is asking us to indwell the gap, not merely observe it.
There is a reason reflection, contemplation, and meditation have always been central to Christian reading of Scripture. This is not merely a suggestion for the contemplatively inclined, while the action-oriented can move to application. The Bible is written for creatures capable of stepping back and attending — not just asking what happened, but what does it mean, how does it connect, what does it ask of me, where am I in this story? Human beings have the strange, costly capacity to slow down and sit with what unsettles us, to hold a question open rather than closing it, to let a text do something to them rather than simply extracting what they came looking for.
The Gospel of John was written for that creature. When we read it the way we read everything else, we miss what it is actually doing.
Reading the Gospel this way teaches something about the pace of genuine encounter — with a person, with truth, with the living God. Sitting in the gap between what we know and what characters have yet to see becomes a personal experience. Like them, we realize it often takes time to see. It requires returning. It takes sitting with what you don’t yet understand long enough for understanding to arrive from somewhere other than your prior framework. Efficient, information-gathering reading cannot produce this. And it is precisely what the Gospel is after.
I am often stuck in that gap myself.
As someone driven by curiosity, by a need to understand how things connect, I am frequently caught between an ought I’ve carefully built, and an is that arrives without warning and refuses to fit. A framework I trusted breaks under the weight of a new encounter. I find myself standing where so many of the Gospel’s characters stand: suddenly known in a way I wasn’t prepared for, realizing I’ve been asking the wrong question longer than I want to admit.
Learning to read John well has become a practice in learning to read my own human experience.
The Prologue doesn’t let me off the hook. It hands me the answers: the light has come, the Word was made flesh, grace arrives in the place of grace, and then walks me through scene after scene of human beings trying to figure out what to do with what they are experiencing. And what I cannot un-see, having spent a great deal of time inside this Gospel with much more to come, is this: these stories are patterns of genuine human encounters with Jesus. The confusion, the half-confessions, the persistent questions, the beautiful moments of witness, the narrative arc of belief — these are honest accounts of human beings standing at the edge of a something greater than any prior framework could contain.
The Gospel meets them there. And it meets us there, too, but only if we are willing to slow down long enough to experience it. Only if we resist the habit of consumption and let the text read us back. Only if we allow reading to be, as it was always meant to be, not just an act of acquisition but an act of formation.
Come and see.
In Christ,
Andrew
On the Johannine narrator’s role in granting the reader privileged access to information that governs all subsequent scenes, see Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 20–34.
Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), 63. On Johannine κρίσις as sunderance, see esp. his treatment of 3:19–21 and 5:22–30.