by Gail R. O’day
The Johannine view of sin and salvation can be a difficult one for contemporary Christians to grasp, because the expiatory view of sin and the exclusive linkage of salvation with Jesus death so dominate conversations within the church. Yet the church loses a powerful witness if it ignores or silences this Johannine voice. First, the Gospel of John invites Christians to re-evaluate the criteria by which one defines sin and by which people are judged. The fourth gospel, as dramatised in John 9, reduces sin to its Christological, and hence theological, essence. Sin is fundamentally about one’s relationship with God, and for the fourth evangelist, the decisive measure of one’s relationship with God is one’s faith in Jesus. This flies in the face of views that want to define sin in relation to right actions and thereby establish the norms of the judgement. To the fourth evangelist, these norms were judgement a very lean: Believe in the revelation of God in Jesus. Judgement is therefore based not on what people do, as the disciples and the Pharisees in John 9 assumed, but on people’s embrace of God in Jesus. The only way to be excluded from Jesus’ offer of salvation is to turn one’s back on that offer. This is a radical and liberating notion of sin and salvation, one that not surprisingly makes many people uncomfortable, because it removes the establishment of norms of behaviour from the category of sin stop from the Johannine perspective, it is not the Christian communities responsibility, just as it was not the Pharisees’, to judge anyone’s sin, because the determination of sin rests with God and Jesus, and the individual and is determined by faith, not actions. The Johannine gospel is thus the most radical example of salvation by grace anywhere in the New Testament.
Second, the Johannine understanding of sin and judgement invites the Christian community to re-examine its understanding of salvation and redemption. The fourth gospel quite explicitly relocates the offer of salvation to Jesus’ life and moves away from a narrow focus on Jesus’ death. The gospel is unequivocally clear: Jesus’ incarnation, not the expiation of his death, brings salvation from sin. This, too, can be this comforting to people who think that an expiatory understanding of salvation is the “only” Christian view. Yet again, to overlook the Johannine is to miss a powerful witness and re-source for the life of faith. The Gospel of John invites Christians to recognize the transformative power of the love of God made manifest in the incarnation and to shape their lives accordingly. This is why Johannine eschatology puts its primary emphasis on Jesus’ coming into the world. To reject Jesus is to reject the love of God in Jesus and so to pass from the possibility of salvation to judgement (cf.3:16-17). Therefore the Pharisees’ announcement of their sight, when in fact they have not seen God in Jesus, marks the sin and the “blind” man’s embrace of Jesus as the Son of Man marks his salvation. Judgement and salvation are not lodged with Jesus’ death; they belong to Jesus’ life.
Gail R. O’day, The Gospel of John, in NIBC, p644-5.
A Thinking Man 