THE OTHER DAY, I overheard a phone conversation between my wife and one of her friends. I didn’t know who it was, but could tell that she was delighted to be talking with someone she hadn’t heard from in a while. I was busy with other things, but still curious — and within earshot. So, yes, I eavesdropped as I went about my business. Here and there, I picked up clues as to the identity of the mystery caller, drawing my own conclusions, congratulating myself for my powers of deduction.

Soon, she hung up the phone and cheerfully announced that she had just been talking to… an entirely different person than I had guessed.

That’s the difficulty we’ve been wrestling with throughout our study of 1 John. Indeed, it’s the challenge of reading and interpreting any New Testament letter, though the degree of difficulty varies. We’re eavesdropping on an ongoing conversation between two parties and can only hear one side. The conversation partners already have a history together and are familiar with the matters being discussed. They don’t need to rehash what they know the other party already knows.

Some of the things John says in his letters, therefore, would have made perfect sense to his readers, but as the invisible third party, we’re left to scouring for clues and making guesses. Most of the time, there are enough clues that we can be reasonably certain of our interpretation. That’s when there’s a scholarly consensus; sometimes the experts mostly agree. But then you have passages like this one from 1 John:

This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. (1 John 5:6-8, NIV)

Say what now?

The references to water and blood together — three of them in three verses — are obviously important but seem to come out of nowhere, at least to anyone who was not party to the original conversation. And when he says, “He did not come by water only, but by water and blood,” it sounds like he’s correcting a misperception or false teaching, like he’s countering something the secessionists believed and taught. Somehow, they had insisted that Jesus came only by water, and not by blood.

But what does that mean?

As you might imagine, theories abound, and scholars draw different clues from different places. What might be a reasonable reading of John’s words?

“WATER AND BLOOD.” Some interpreters, not surprisingly, take this as a reference back to the story of the crucifixion in John’s gospel. When a soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear to make sure he was dead, blood and water flowed from the wound. John himself treats the incident as both an important piece of eyewitness testimony and a fulfillment of prophecy (John 19:34-37).

But why does John say “water and blood” instead of “blood and water,” the order the words appear in his own gospel? My former colleague Marianne Meye Thompson suggests that the word order is inverted because John wants to stress the word “blood” at the end of the second sentence, like this: “Jesus didn’t come by water only, as you-know-who insists, but by water and blood.”

Still, if water and blood refer collectively to the crucifixion, what errant meaning was being given to the significance of “water” by itself? Surely, no one was arguing that only water flowed from the crucified Jesus’ side. No, the physical water and blood that poured from the wound pointed beyond themselves. What did they symbolize?

Some scholars take them as references, respectively, to the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion. Others take water as referring to the amniotic fluid of physical birth, and blood as referring to Jesus’ physical death. And some observe that in John’s gospel water is symbolic of the Holy Spirit. Pay attention, for example, to both Jesus’ words and John’s interpretation of them in this passage from John 7:

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. (John 7:37-39)

Moreover, the word “water” may have overlapping layers of meaning. In John 3:5, Jesus tells Nicodemus that in order to enter the kingdom of God, one must be spiritually cleansed and reborn, to be “born of water and the Spirit.” When Jesus is baptized with water the Holy Spirit also comes upon him, and John the Baptist declares that Jesus in turn will baptize others with the Spirit (John 1:32-33). The blood might then symbolize the other end of Jesus’ earthly ministry — not just his physical death, per se, but what that death accomplished. As John himself says near the beginning of his letter, “the blood of Jesus…purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

John, as we’ve seen, has been emphasizing the central importance of a right understanding of Jesus for the Christian faith, against the background of false teaching and controversy. We may never know precisely what John meant in this passage, but we don’t have to take him as giving us a list of three separate, distinct sources of testimony to the identity and work of Jesus. His primary point here, it seems, is not that there are exactly three witnesses, but that the list is incomplete without “blood.”

What, then, was the heretical belief John was trying to correct? Those who left the community may have emphasized the role of the Spirit — perhaps even citing the image of the Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism — in a way that downplayed or even eliminated the need for Jesus to die on the cross. The idea of God being crucified, after all, was scandalous, and one version of Gnosticism held that the divine “Christ” came upon the man Jesus at his baptism then fled and left him hanging — literally! — at the crucifixion.

Such a reading also helps make sense of what John argues in chapter 1: that no one can claim to be without sin (vss. 8-10). The secessionists, with their Gnostic ideas, may have taught that they had been cleansed and saved when the Spirit came upon them. So who needs the cross? Who needs to be cleansed by blood? Water is enough. Spirit is enough.

And that’s way less icky for people who found bodily existence itself a second-rate way to live.

Whether that reconstruction is correct or not, all of us would do well to recognize the danger of distorting the gospel by keeping the bits we like and ignoring the rest. There is no gospel without the cross. There is no atonement without the blood. And as much as someone might want to privilege the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, the Spirit would agree.