Sublime

so the gospel writers told the story of Jesus in order to undergird and reinforce the Christian determination to follow him, to go on following him, to live as he lived and, if necessary, to die as he died, believing that God’s kingdom, established through his work, was becoming a reality in more and more of the world through their own lives, work,

“The truth of the Gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine. . . . Most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually.”14

John, then, is certainly not an exception to the generalization that all four gospels bring the kingdom and the cross into the closest possible combination. One could in principle go back to the synoptics and show passage after passage in which the same is true. Think of the kingdom agenda of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), which itself points

Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the