We know how it is that different people listening to the same words get different impressions and carry away with them quite different meanings.  We hear what we are able to hear.  And S. John was able to hear what the other disciples of our Lord seem not to have heard.  What dwelt in his memory and was worked up in his meditations and was at length transmitted to us, was the meaning of such incidents as the interview with Nicodemus, and the talk with the woman of Samaria, the discourse on the Holy Eucharist and the great High-priestly prayer.  Men have felt the contrast between S. John and the other Evangelists so intensely that they have said that this is another Christ who is presented by S. John, and the influences which have shaped the author of the Fourth Gospel are quite other than those which shaped the men of the inner circle of Jesus.  But no:  it is the instinctive, or rather the Spirit-guided, selection of the material afforded by those years of association with Jesus for the purpose of transmitting to the Church a spiritual depth and beauty, a spiritual significance in our Lord’s teaching, that the earlier Gospel had hardly touched.

Which perhaps they could not touch because when they wrote there was not yet in the Church the spiritual experience which could fully interpret our Lord.  Through the life of union with the risen Jesus and all the spiritual experience, all the illumined intelligence that that life brought, S. John was enabled to understand and interpret as he did.  Writing far on toward the end of the first century he was writing out of the personal experience of Christian living of many years, which brought with it year by year an increased power of spiritual vision opening to him the depth and wonder of the fact of God made man.  It is to an experience of our Lord that he appeals as the basis of his teaching.  “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life:  (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us:  and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ.”  And as we read on in S. John’s Epistles we cannot fail to see how deeply the years of meditation have influenced his understanding of our Lord and His teaching, and how much his past experience of our Lord has been illumined by the experience of the risen Jesus which has followed.  At no time, we are certain, has S. John been out of touch with his Master.