Biblical reflection for Partnership for World Mission Conference Nov 2008

Clare Amos is Director of Theological Studies, Anglican Communion, London

During the last 2 years, one of the pieces of work I have most enjoyed has been working with an international group to prepare the Bible studies that were used at the Lambeth Conference. The team consisted of Gerald West from South Africa, our leader, members from India, Tanzania, New Zealand, the Congo, the United States, and myself from England and the Anglican Communion Office. We were all committed to producing material that enabled the bishops and spouses at the Lambeth Conference to engage with the Bible in a way that allowed them to draw on and share insights gained from their own contexts. I hope – and think – we succeeded, because most of the participants felt that the regular daily session of Bible study was one of the highlights of the Conference.

Archbishop Rowan asked us to take the Gospel of John as the biblical book to base the Bible studies on, but within that overall parameter the team was given freedom to choose exactly which passages to select and what theme we might follow to link them together. We decided to use the ‘I am’ sayings of the Gospel – but look at them in a slightly different and we hoped fresh way, that offered new insights.  When Jesus in John’s Gospel refers to himself as ‘I am’ he seems to be making a connection to the great Old Testament passages in the Book of Exodus where God reveals his name to Moses as ‘Yahweh’, ‘I am who I am’. He is in effect claiming
identity with the one whom his people worshipped as God. It is a consistent theme of this particular Gospel.

Most of us, I am sure, are familiar with the great declarations of Jesus such as ‘I am the Bread of Life’  ‘I am the Light of the World’, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ – what I call the ‘I am sayings with a predicate’; but perhaps not everybody realises that there are a considerable number of other ‘I am’ sayings in the Gospel – which are sometimes half hidden by the English translation, but where in Greek Jesus is also using the same words ‘ego eimi’, the emphatic ‘I am’, to speak about himself. And in what I will be sharing with you in the next few minutes I will be focusing in particular on two of these hidden ‘I am’ statements...

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