Bible Stories In John

The last few weeks - mid week - I have been working through the stories of the Gospel of John found in chapters 9 - 12.

We just finished chapter 12 last night.

Some stories in this segment are rather easy to tell as stories: the man born blind and the raising of Lazarus come to mind.

But each of these stories is then surrounded by confrontations of one sort or another that - for me - make for difficult story telling because they make for difficult memorization due to having a variety of twists and turns involved.

Chapter 12 presents it's own problems in telling as a story because you see the disciples approaching Jesus to tell him about Greeks wanting to visit him and Jesus goes into a long monologue that seems completely detached from the issue of Greeks...until the end of it. I wasn't confident enough in my storytelling skills to try to pull that one off.

The triumphal entry and especially the end of the chapter are densely packed with Old Testament allusions and quotations that make it harder for me to memorize so we just read and discussed them.

Most people doing bible story telling overseas do not have these problems per se because they are not attempting to "tell" a whole book usually (though you could with a book like Jonah). They are selecting individual stories as part of a "story track" geared especially to the worldview of the people they serve.

Obviously as the people become literate or get recordings of the whole book in their own language they then deal with these issues.

Next week in time for the Christian Passover, we have the Upper Room Narrative of John 13 - 17 that begins with a long "story"of the footwashing but then enters into very "dense" and harder to memorize and internalize declarations by Jesus that culminate in His High Priestly Prayer.