“Joy made complete” is the theme of a Bible conference on the book of John, held by the Catholic Diocese of Broken Bay (just to the north of Sydney).

Professor Moloney, of the Australian Catholic University is one of the keynote speakers and Eternity spoke to him, curious to see what take he would have on the Gospel. Checking out Professor Moloney’s biography Eternity notices that he has been published by leading Catholic publishers (Paulist, The Liturgical press from Collegeville), but also evangelical publishers Baker Academic, and Hendrickson.

Professor Moloney, what do Christians need to get from John?

We tend to hear the Gospel of John, and any of the gospels in short snatches. We need to be aware that the Gospel of John is a very particular story that runs from beginning to end with its own narrative dynamic. That is the good news—not this passage or that passage: it important to communicate the whole message, the whole story.

What if I am sitting next to you in an aircraft and you tell me you are presenting at a conference about John, and I say “tell me about it”?

The bottom line message is that the Gospel of John is an attempt to communicate the deep belief of a particular author from early Christianity, that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth—what he did and what he said—God’s love for humankind (and it is salvific love) is manifested.

That’s where the joy comes through—God so loved the world that he sent his only son, and he was sent into the world not to judge the world but to give it life.

That is John 3:16 and it is the heart of what the gospel is trying to communicate. By means of it’s whole story.

So if you get that, you get Joy.

What does that Joy feel like?

I would say that if you come to grips with the message of John, the joy comes from the fact that John proclaims that the joy of being saved, of being aware of salvation, comes about NOW.

The acceptance, in faith, of the word and person of Jesus, brings the joy.

We don’t have to keep on working hard, slogging away at trying to be good Christians, and hope that at the end of time we will make it.

John’s Gospel tells us that we have got it now, because of what has already happened for us in and through Jesus Christ.

This is what the scholars would call “John’s focus on realised eschatology”. The end time is not only at the end time. The end time is meeting the word of Jesus as it comes to us in the Gospel—in every moment.

So the word transports us, in some sense, to the beginning of the end?

Exactly. And we participate in that already.

What are we saved from?

We are saved from the “lostness” of a person or people without any sense of the divine. Deep within the heart of every human being there is this search for the divine but of course most of us don’t want to know.

That’s what it saves us from. Not from any malicious power, but from what is in Australian society—a sort of sense of lostness and a seeking to find its identity in things like possessions, the coffee shop, what my wife wears, my beach house, my motor car, my promotion. In the end, those things disappear. But the love of God for us makes sense of all of this.

We are saved from—well I use that word—lostness.

Traditionally, not only in Christianity but pre-Christian and in other religions, this has been called demonic and all the rest of it. Well, that is fine, that is one language you can use.

I think it is a more immediate reality around us all the time. And each one of us is subject to this.

If lostness is not knowing who we really are, what is “foundness”?

Foundness: it is a sense of a double-edged belonging. There is recognition of a God that is made known by Jesus—that is one edge of it. But this recognition of this God who is made known by Jesus, leads to the mutual love which is the community of the believing church. So “by this they shall know that you are my disciples… that you love one another as I loved you”.

So the knowledge of God made known in Jesus, necessarily spins off to a social belonging

That is the “foundness”.

This is particularly strong in the Johanine letters (the letters written by John). “Anyone who says that he loves God and does not love his neighbour is a liar.”

So John’s message speaks directly to the average Australian?

More powerfully than ever. It is an amazing thing because (John) can be seen as a sort of abstract text.

But once you begin to wrestle with it and see the whole story, it speaks very powerfully to the average Australian.

www.dbb.org.au/bible