The Violin Guild
Parable taken from Tom Wright’s John for Everyone.
Jesus refers to himself as the ‘good’ shepherd. But our word ‘good’ doesn’t really catch the full meaning of the word John has written here… The word John uses can also mean ‘beautiful’. This doesn’t refer to what Jesus looked like. It’s about the sheer attractiveness of what, as the shepherd, he was doing. When he calls, people want to come. When they realize he has died for them, they want to even more. The point of calling Jesus ‘the good shepherd’ is to emphasise the strange, compelling power of his love.
The Pool of Siloam: Can a place hold spiritual power/significance?
Last week, for the first of our Lab summer series on John, we explored the story of Jesus healing the man born blind from John 9v1-12 (you can listen to it here). Here’s an offshoot of my thoughts/research that didn’t make the final version of my talk.
One of the really interesting elements of the story, is that Jesus doesn’t just tell the blind man to see - instead he goes through a strange process of making mud out of the dirt on the ground, rubbing it in the bloke’s eyes, and then telling him to go and wash at a very specific place - The Pool of Siloam - which at the time was considered a ’sacred place with healing power’.
The whole encounter draws us into asking some questions: Why not just simply heal the man? What was the significance of the ‘ritual’ that Jesus seems to go through? And was there a significance to that particular pool?
