I Started at the End
There’s a line near the front of John’s Gospel that stopped me cold the first time I read it, because it made no sense at all. Jesus is talking to a man named Nicodemus, at night, and out of nowhere he says: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.
What serpent? I had no Moses in my head. No wilderness, no snake on a pole, no idea what any of it was doing in the middle of a conversation about being born again. The sentence assumed I already knew a story, and I didn’t. It was like walking in on the last ten minutes of a film and hearing a character say, “and that’s why we never go back to the lighthouse.” Everyone on screen nods, something heavy passes between them, and you sit there thinking: what lighthouse?
John does this to you the whole way through. He keeps stopping the action to say that something happened “so that the scripture would be fulfilled” — the soldiers not breaking his legs, the dice thrown for his clothes — and I could not have named a single one of the scriptures he meant. Fulfilled from where? People kept saying the word Messiah as if it settled an argument I couldn’t hear. John the Baptist points across a river and announces, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” and I thought: what lamb? Why a lamb, of all things? The whole book read like footnotes to a book I hadn’t been given.
And then there’s Abraham.
Jesus keeps circling back to this one name. Abraham. He talks about him the way you’d talk about someone the whole room already knows, and I didn’t know him from anyone. At one point Jesus says a single sentence about Abraham that makes the crowd bend down and pick up stones to kill him on the spot — before Abraham was, I am. I read it and shrugged. Odd grammar, maybe. To me it was a strange little sentence. To them it was worth killing over. I was standing in a room where everyone had just gasped, and I hadn’t heard the joke. I couldn’t even tell what kind of thing had been said — a boast, a blasphemy, a claim, a threat. Only that it had landed like a struck match.
That, it turns out, is the strangest part of reading a story from its final chapter. You can’t see the plot, but you can see the reactions. And the reactions are enormous. People weep, rage, fall down, run away, plot murder. The intensity is the shadow cast by a story you can’t see, and the size of the shadow tells you the thing casting it must be very large.
So it goes, all the way to the end. He’s betrayed by one of his own, arrested in a garden, dragged through a night of trials, and nailed to a cross outside the city wall, where he dies, slowly, in public. They take the body down and seal it in a tomb. And then, on the third day, the tomb is open and empty and he is walking around again — eating fish, letting a frightened man named Thomas put his fingers into the wounds.
I closed the book and reached for the only conclusion big enough to hold what I’d just watched. This man must be the Son of God. What else do you call someone death couldn’t keep?
Here is what I only understood much later. I’d grabbed that phrase — Son of God — the way you grab the biggest word within reach when you’re overwhelmed. I meant something like “a divine being,” “not one of us,” “more than a man.” And that isn’t wrong. But it wasn’t the first thing those words meant to the people standing under that cross. For them, “Son of God” wasn’t primarily a claim about divinity. It was the title of Israel’s true king — a promise made a thousand years earlier to a shepherd who became a king named David, that one of his sons would sit on the throne forever. I’d stumbled onto the right words for the wrong reasons. I’d been handed the verdict and had skipped the entire trial.
Because that’s what I’d actually done. I hadn’t read a book. I’d read the last chapter of a book and mistaken it for the whole of it.
All the things that made John feel like a locked door — the serpent, the fulfilled prophecies, Abraham, the lamb, the strange holy weight that hung on the word king — those weren’t decoration. They were the plot. They were the chapters I’d never read. John is written for someone who already knows a long, strange, four-act story: a world made good and gone wrong; a man called Abraham, promised out of nowhere that his family would somehow be how God put the whole mess right; a people carried out of slavery through a split sea; a law, a temple, a line of kings, a catastrophe, an exile, and then centuries of waiting — a whole nation on tiptoe, watching the road, waiting for God to come back and keep his word. Jesus walks onto the page as the answer to a question it took that entire history to ask.
Read him without the question, and here’s what you get: a man doing inexplicable things, provoking inexplicable reactions, and pulling off one final miracle so large you file it under “must be God” because you have nowhere else to put it. Which is exactly what I did.
But a resurrection with no story behind it is only a wonder. A spectacular one, sure. Still, a wonder is a thing that merely happens to you. A climax is a thing you’ve been waiting for. The empty tomb only carries its full weight if you’ve felt the centuries of waiting it answers — the promise to Abraham, the long humiliation of exile, the prophets insisting through clenched teeth that one day God himself would come back to his people. Miss all of that, and Easter is an astonishing event. Catch it, and Easter is the morning the whole story turns over on its hinge.
I think this is why so many of us, raised on the Gospels by themselves, end up with a Jesus who floats. He’s kind, he’s mysterious, he heals people and dies and rises — but he hangs slightly off the ground he grew out of, like a cut flower in a glass of water, no roots showing. We were handed the answer and never told the question, so we can feel that he’s the point without being able to say what he’s the point of. We know he matters. We’ve quietly forgotten there was ever a plot.
There’s one detail I walked straight past the first time, and now I can’t stop looking at it. John’s very first sentence is, In the beginning was the Word. I read it as a grand opening flourish. It isn’t. It’s a quotation. It’s the opening line of the entire Bible — in the beginning God created — deliberately reached back for, so that anyone who’d read the first book would feel the hair lift on the back of their neck: he’s doing it again. A new creation. From his first four words, John is telling you that this is the last chapter, and pointing you all the way back to the first.
So if John reads to you like a reply to a letter you never received — you aren’t confused. You’re right. Go back and read the letter. Start where it actually starts, in the beginning, and read forward through Abraham and the sea and the kings and the long ache of waiting, until you come out again at the man lifted up outside the wall. Then read John’s own last lines, where he finally tells you, plainly, why he bothered to write the whole thing down: so that you would believe this is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in believing, live.
This time you’ll know what he means by it. You’ll know why Thomas dropped to his knees in front of the wounds. And you’ll finally know what serpent, exactly, he’d been talking about that first strange night with Nicodemus.