Disordered: The Holy Icons and Racial Myths

Abstract

distraction to the author but would have been fascinating to student and colleague? It is possible that some will appear in different forms in the future and possible, too, that we have some of them already in the six books that David Ford wrote alongside this one. But, like John’s Gospel, our eyes should be less on what was not written or what we wish had been written, and more on what will be written in the testimony of the church by those who – with the help of this commentary – will go on reading John and testifying to Jesus because of John. The legacy of the commentary will also be seen in further study of John and of the community in which this gospel was formed. For my part, the commentary made me want to know more about that community, which claimed to know well the authorial source of the Gospel, the one who knew what it was to be loved by Christ, and especially among them, Mary, whom that disciple took to his home. The style of John repeatedly reflecting on ‘grace upon grace’ seems like the way of the mother who, according to Luke, pondered so much in her heart. Her place among the witnesses and testifiers seems seldom considered among the commentators, and it is only just alluded to here. Other readers will have different questions raised in their minds by this book, and many others will have stirrings in their souls which will take them on new journeys of enquiry, theological and spiritual. All of that is to be welcomed as evidence of what Ford calls the ‘continual theological questioning’ (p. 209) provoked by John, the ‘potentially limitless’ (p. 213) capacity of John to generate reflection on the deepest realities of Christian faith. The test of those enquiries, and the writings and sermons they provoke, will be whether they maintain the same sort of discipline to search out the ‘deep plain sense’ (p. 389) of John to which this commentary commits itself, so that John’s readers and hearers, students and scholars, will find themselves saying of the one around whom this majestic text is constructed, ‘It is the Lord’, and will hear him say, ‘Follow me’ (John 21:7, 22).