There’s a story about a young pianist who was working on a piece by Bach. After the recital, she said to her teacher, “Thank goodness we’ve finished Bach.” Her teacher looked at her and said firmly, “My dear, one never finishes Bach.” Christians have the tendency to approach the fundamental truths of our faith in this way, as if there comes a point where we can look at them and say, “I’ve learned this—I can move on to the next thing.” The truth that we’re saved by God’s grace alone and we live by his grace alone, for instance, is something we need to keep coming back to and re-learning because the sinful part of us keeps pushing it out of our minds.
That’s one reason it’s a good thing we have those headings of the VSF creed up on the wall: we need the continual reminder that God is bigger. We do well to take that a bit further and remind ourselves that Jesus is bigger. The universal temptation is to make God safe, and perhaps especially to make Jesus safe—or maybe it’s just especially easy to do with Jesus. We think in comparisons, and so when we read the stories of Jesus as a human being, we try to fit him into our normal frame of reference. Even if we believe he was fully God, we have no model anywhere in view for what that looks like, and so our natural tendency is to imagine Jesus as merely human. John’s aim in beginning his gospel is to write about Jesus in a way that prevents that tendency from obscuring our view of the greatness and uniqueness of Jesus.
This is why he calls Jesus the Word—in Greek, logos. Logos was a loaded word for both parts of John’s audience, for both Jews and Greeks. Now, you don’t want a three-hour lecture on this, and I really didn’t want to write one, so I’m going to grossly oversimplify this. From the time of Heraclitus, five centuries before the birth of Christ, logos was a central word in Greek philosophy. Different schools of thought used the word in different ways, but the logos-concept was crucial to many of them. It meant “word,” but also the human capacity for reason, and the argument one presented for one’s position, and the worldview that underlay that argument; and for many Greek thinkers, it rose to the level of metaphysics. It could mean the central truth and essential nature of things, the creative power of the universe, and even the mind of God—an impersonal God, to be sure—which guided, controlled, and directed all things.
For the Jews, logos was one of two words used to translate the Hebrew word daḇar, which meant both “word” and “thing.” Again and again in Scripture, right from the start, we see “the word of the Lord” as the agent of his powerful creative or redeeming work. He speaks, and the world comes to be; the word of the Lord comes to the prophets, and they speak, and the world changes. In Isaiah 55:11, God declares, “My word that goes out from my mouth shall not return to me empty, but shall achieve my purpose, and shall accomplish that for which I sent it”; in the Psalms, we have descriptions of God sending out his word to heal his people and to melt the winter snows. God’s word is his act—it’s his power in motion to carry out his will.
In calling Jesus the logos, John invoked ideas of a creative divine power in both Jews and Greeks. Rather than having to start with a human being and help readers see that human being as the God of the universe, he chose to do the opposite. He begins on a cosmic scale: “In the beginning was the Word.” He’s echoing the first words of Genesis but looking further back: to the root of the universe, before anything existed, when there was only God. William Barclay rendered this, “When the world had its beginning, the Word was already there,” because it’s a beginning before the world’s beginning. From before there was time, the Word, Jesus, was there.
More than that, the Word existed in face-to-face relationship with God. Literally, the second clause reads, “the Word was toward God.” That’s bad English, so we usually translate it “the Word was with God,” but that’s too weak. The last time I went to a football game, I was there with 70,000 other people, but I was only connected to a few of them. The Word wasn’t just in the same room as God, he was on intimate terms with God. John is making two points here: one, the Word is a distinct person from God as the Jews conceived of God, the person whom the New Testament calls the Father; and two, there’s a deep personal relationship between them.
Having established that distinction, John says, “the Word was God.” This must have floored his Jewish readers. In defiance of the pagan world around them, they knew there was only one God who alone created the world and was separate from it, not to be confused with any part of his creation. They could affirm the Word as a created being, but God? Hard stuff, but John the Jew affirms it unflinchingly. He has already made it clear that the Word is a separate person from God as the Jews understood God, but at the same time, he insists the Word was fully God. The Word was as truly God as God the Father was.
These are deep waters, and you may well be wondering why John starts here—why he doesn’t start off with stories of angels and pregnancy and birth and sheep like Matthew and Luke do. Again, it’s because he’s doing something different. Their concern was to show where Jesus came from, to make the case that he was indeed the long-promised Messiah of the Jews. John’s later, he doesn’t need to repeat what they’ve done; his concern is to show why that matters. He’s answering the “so what?” question and telling us why we should care.
Familiarity has dulled our ears, but to the answer to that question will still stagger our souls to the core if we really hear it: an unmarried girl got pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy who was God. Not thought he was God, not was very godly, not was a minor god, not was close to God, but was, completely and totally in every atom of his being, the one and only God who created everything that is and keeps it all going with a thought. He was fully human—he was born human, he ate, he laughed, he wept, like any other human, and he died like any other human, only much, much worse—and yet he was also fully God. God was up in heaven, but God was also down here walking the earth as one of us, and they loved each other perfectly, and wanted us to share in their perfect love. That’s why God was born among the animals and the outcasts and the poor, so that the broken relationship between us and him could be healed.
Because of this, we can know God. Human efforts to describe him will always fail—it’s part of that whole “God is bigger” thing, combined with our tendencies to both wishful thinking and despair—but in Jesus, God described himself. In Jesus, God came down and he took everything he’d ever told us to that point and said, “Look—see me? This is what all this looks like. This is who I am.” Jesus was born, and we stopped having to hear about God second-hand for a while—he spoke to us directly and told us the truth about himself, and us, and the world.
Of course, John doesn’t go there immediately, because he has a couple other things to address. Before talking about the Word coming into the world as a human being, he wants to establish that the Word is connected to the world, because he is the creative agent through whom God made everything. John underlines that “everything” a couple times, just so we’re clear: “All things were made through him; nothing that exists was made without him.” The Word was the source of life in the universe—and, interestingly, John ties life to light, which will be an important word in this book. “The light shines in the darkness,” he tells us, “and the darkness has not mastered it.” The darkness has not gained the upper hand on the light, either to understand it or to defeat it—indeed, it could not defeat it in part because it could not understand it. And if the light is the life of God which brought life to the world, what is the darkness that opposes it? Anti-life, anti-creation—physical death, but far more. Undoing, unmaking, nullity, destruction.
Our problem is, the darkness convinces us that it’s light; the power of death makes us believe it’s life-giving. John doesn’t talk about this here, but he knows it. Paul puts it most clearly, in 2 Corinthians 11: “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, so it’s no surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.” The light shows us everything done under the cover of darkness—and people scuttle for the darkness like bugs when someone turns over a big rock. John notes that in chapter 3, which Tom will be talking about next Sunday. I’m looking forward to his message, because we had a great discussion about it this past week, and he had some really good things to say. The point I want to make here is that when John says people preferred the darkness because their deeds were evil, it doesn’t necessarily mean they knew their deeds were evil. That’s often the case, but more often it’s because they’ve convinced themselves their deeds were good and they don’t want anyone telling them otherwise.
And so the true light came into the world, giving light to everyone—and the world didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t what the world was looking for. The world, at any given point, has clear ideas about what it wants to believe is light. Different cultures have different ideas, of course, and so they fight with each other, with each side believing itself to be defending the light against the darkness; and because these ideas change over time, the present either looks down on the past with sneering condemnation or pines for it as a golden age. Apart from God’s gracious work, no one could see the light as light, because what we want to see always gets in the way. As Tim Keller observes, “If the Bible is true (and it is)—if it’s not the product of any one particular culture, but it came down from God—that means it would have to offend everybody’s culture somewhere. In other words, if it didn’t offend you somewhere, it couldn’t be God’s word.” That was even true of God’s own people, who had his word and were supposed to have been shaped by it. Even they didn’t receive him—even his own family didn’t receive him, apart from his parents—because he wasn’t what they wanted to see.
Now, I referenced that quote from Dr. Keller some weeks ago in the Opening, and Randy returned serve on me with a pointed question: “Where does it offend you?” That was too long an answer for the time, but it’s on point here, so Randy, here you go: even after all these years of being convicted that I need to seek out and consciously listen and submit to those things in God’s word that I don’t want to hear, the biggest thing that still offends me is his grace. The other day, my mind wandered a bit, and I realized I’d constructed a Joseph scenario in my head with certain individuals in the position of Joseph’s brothers—to give myself the satisfaction of sending them, metaphorically speaking, back into the desert to starve. It hit me—hard—that Joseph forgave his brothers. At that point, I wouldn’t have. Joseph was in the light. I was clinging to the darkness, being offended by the light.
It’s a miracle of God’s grace that any of us can turn to the light and open our eyes. It’s certainly a miracle that I can, or ever did—and yes, there are occasions when even that seems offensive to me. It’s a miracle that he gives us the power and justification to become children of God, born anew, born of God—which is, of course, something else John picks up in chapter 3, in the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus. And it’s a miracle of a different sort that he sticks with us in the becoming. There is much still unresolved in each of our hearts, but God isn’t surprised by any of it, and it’s nothing he can’t handle—indeed, he includes it in his plan for us and for others in surprising ways—and it’s nothing that will defeat him. There is much still unresolved in each of our hearts, but in his good time, there won’t be.
This is all rooted in the greatest miracle of all, that—as Eugene Peterson translated it in The Message—“The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” Which neighborhood? Ours. Everyone’s. Remember who were the only invited guests at his birth? Shepherds. The lowest of the low. “We have seen his glory,” John says, and it was the shepherds who saw it first, in a way that even Mary and Joseph didn’t.
That was, I think, God’s way of making it clear he was absolutely serious. For any good Jew, the idea that God could become human in any way was unthinkable. He was far, far too big for the physical world to contain him, and far, far too holy for any human being to survive seeing him. Even Moses wasn’t allowed to see God’s face, and for a Jew, it didn’t get any better than Moses. The idea that any human being could see God and his glory was inconceivable—so God conceived him. In Jesus, the unlimited, all-encompassing, holy reality of the life of God took shape in all the messiness and limitations of human flesh, and the God who could not be seen became not only fully visible but tangible. We could see him; we could touch him; we could hear him speak; we could throw rocks at him and nail him to a piece of wood . . . He gave the worst of us the right to be the first outside his family to meet him, and let the best of us convene a kangaroo court to send him to a criminal’s execution. That is how serious God was, and is, about healing the alienation and estrangement between us and himself, and bringing us home.
Some number of years ago, I received a Christmas card, I have long since forgotten from whom, that read, “The miracle is that God dwelt among us and would not leave.” That’s the nub of it, I think. Herod tried to kill him when he was a wee small child; his parents saved him by fleeing to Egypt, but they came back. His friends and neighbors threw him out of the synagogue and took him to the top of a cliff to throw him off; he didn’t let them kill him, of course, he walked away from them, but he came back. Eventually, the leaders of his own people had him executed, sure they had finally gotten rid of him for good, but he came back. He came back for us. And when he did, in the end, leave us physically, he sent us his Holy Spirit so that he could still be present with us in another, deeper way. The one who lit the stars, who shaped the star that would shine on his birth, moved into our neighborhood as one of us, despite us, for us.
I’d like to close with the final stanzas of the poem “Christmas” by John Betjeman, which I think capture something of the wonder of this truth:
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare—
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
Picture © John Stuart. Used with gratitude. Title taken from Michael Card’s song and album Starkindler.