JOHN 1: 1-8
IN THE in-between
From the end of the prophets there was 400 years of waiting for the spirit of Elijah to return. The spirit of Elijah, passed to Elisha and the other prophets, fell silent with the final words of the Old Testament, from Malachi 4:5:
Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.
For 400 years, the people awaited a prophet to come and announce the Messiah and the day of the Lord which would judge the world and recreate David’s kingdom in permanence.
Within one-hundred years, Alexander the Great spread his reign across the ancient world and as far east as Persia. The Greek language becomes the imperial standard, and the Jewish scriptures are copied into the Greek version called the Septuagint.
The synagogue is born—gatherings of God’s people beyond the bounds of the temple walls. These were houses of worship and study where Jews could learn Torah and hear commentary from local rabbis.
Between 174-164 BC Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek/Persian leader, attacks Egypt and oppresses the Jews along the way. He murders tens of thousands—a Hitler of his day. His plan to destroy Jerusalem and the temple is thwarted by the Maccabees (we all should read the Apocrypha, which was produced and collected during this in-between period). Antiochus looked to win but the Jews held out. It takes seven days for olive oil to be burnable in the lamps of the temple. The miracle of Hannukah is that the lamps burned for seven days such that the temple flame never went out.
In 66 BC Roman General Pompey intervened in a civil war among various factions vying for power and maintained control until Judea formally became a province of Rome in 6 AD.
The people were hungry and thirsty for the Messiah. They needed God to come down and reveal himself just as the prophet Isaiah had said over 400 years prior:
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,…to make your name known! —Isaiah 64:1-2
After all that time and waiting the spirit of Elijah returns in the person of John the Baptizer—the first prophet seen in 400 years—who is not recognized as a prophet by the Temple authorities. He has all the signs and the people follow him in droves, believing him to be an authentic prophet of the Lord, but the Sadducees and Pharisees reject him outright because he wasn’t one of them.
TWO JOHNS
Just as we have John the Baptizer who leads us up to Jesus, we have John the evangelist who follows and leads us on from Jesus. One John is a pre-ministry witness to Jesus, the other a post-ministry witness. Although John’s gospel is likely the last one to be written, it corrects some of the ill thinking that grew out of the early church. John reaffirms with ringing clarity the authentic faith of the original Apostles to quash new-blooming heresies and set the Church aright.
It is said that the early church fathers read the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—through John! Many moderns wrongly devalue John due to its later authorship, but they do so at their own peril. Understanding John is critical to understanding the early faith of the Apostles, the earliest Church, and the other, competing, gospel communities.
IN THE BEGINNING
It is right that we should begin The Story’s New Testament narrative with John’s prologue, for it is the new Genesis. Let’s hear that beginning again, verses 1-3:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
This is the creation story updated for the new age in Christ. A new era has begun in Jesus because the curse of death has been annulled and the code for immortality cracked. Jesus lives, not merely in the popular imagination but in the flesh. He is raised.
Notice in those first lines we get the when, the where, and the who for the cosmos. Not so much how. We are given the reason for creation. That reason is the Word.
Now the word for word is logos, which you’ve probably heard before. For the ancient Greeks, the Logos was more than just a word for word; it was a foundational philosophical reality. Its meanings were several:
- 1.Speech or discourse.
- 2.Reason, logic, and/or that which persuades.
- 3.The animating principle behind the entire cosmos.
- 4.The Demiurge: an intermediary divine being in-between God and the material world.
The Greeks believed that God was pure and perfect and the material cosmos was evil. To them, what was “spiritual” was always the good and whatever was material or in the flesh was wicked. The Logos was understood as the means by which the good God could shape the evil world. But it wasn’t an inanimate force; it was part of God.
When John writes In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God, ancient Greeks would have yawned. “Yeah, we know all this—tell us something we don’t know.” When they get to “and the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us,” they would have gasped. For the Logos to become flesh would be for the unthinkable and impossible to occur.
Philo, a Greek-educated Jew (20BC-50AD), writes in a way to make George Lucas envious:
“The Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated.”
Ironically, Philo called the Logos “the first-born of God.”
LOGOS: GOD’S SON
In common speech, when we speak of the “Word of God,” what are we talking about? Yes, we refer to the Bible as the Word of God. We really should be careful about this. Nowhere in the Bible does it claim to be the Word of God or the words of God, although many of the Lord’s words are recorded there.
The Bible clearly does call Jesus the Word of God. Jesus is the Word, the Logos made flesh.
The Word of God is Jesus Christ. We shouldn’t confuse the Bible with the person of Jesus.
When I was first ordained and working in Dallas, I used to go down to Dallas Seminary to browse their bookstore and pick fights(theological) with Dallas seminarians. Out in front of the seminary there is a sign: “Preach the Word.” Standing among several seminarians I asked them, “When are they going to finish it?” “What do you mean?” they asked. I asked them, “What does it mean to preach the Word.” One of them held up his big Scofield Reference Bible. “Preach the Word—the Bible!”
“No,” I said, “the sign ought to say, ‘Preach the Word and Him crucified.’”
We must take care that our figurative language not be taken literally. We mustn’t confuse the container with the thing contained.
If I’m holding a fresh pot of coffee and I ask you if you’d like a cup, then I’d be a cad to hand you an empty coffee mug. You don’t really want the cup, you want that tasty, dark, br0wn liquid that goes inside.
Likewise, if you have a ground-floor room with no windows and you add a big, beautiful, plate-glass window which opens onto your gorgeous flower garden, you might say, “What a lovely window!” but only an oddball would pay all their attention to the glazing and framing of the window itself.
The Bible is not the Word of God in and of itself, it is the container, the window, through which the Word is revealed to us. It is a pointing finger, pointing with eternal persistence toward Jesus, who is the Word of God made flesh.
In worship, before every reading of Scripture, we say “Listen and hear the Word of the Lord,” We don’t say, “Hear the words of the Lord,” nor are we saying “Hear the Bible.” We are saying, “Listen, and hear the revelation of Jesus Christ.” At the end of every reading, we say, “the Word of the Lord” which is not a celebration of the Bible itself, but a celebration of Jesus who is revealed through Scripture. We do not reverence words on paper; that is what we call Bibliolatry. So let us take care. Jesus is the Word of God—the Word made flesh—and the Bible is the Word written. Whenever we refer to the Bible as the Word of God, we are referring to what it reveals, not what it is in and of itself.
Poetically it’s fine, but it to say, “Hey, hand me The Word” when pointing to my Bible is the same as saying, “Hey, hand me Jesus,” which is not all bad.
JOHN’S CORRECTION
Again: the other gospels need to be seen through John because John corrects misconceptions that had grown up in various outcroppings of infant Christianity. John makes crystal clear what was the faith of the original Apostles; namely, that Jesus is fully divine as well as fully human.
The earliest heresies tended toward one of two errors. Like the two sides of a tightrope walker’s balance pole. On one side the fall was to say that Jesus was not really divine, but merely human. The other side falls by saying that Jesus was divine, but only appeared to be human.
The first of these two heresies is called Adoptionism. Adoptionism holds that Jesus was a normal man who was chosen—perhaps at the moment of his baptism—to be the Messiah and figurative “Sonf of God.” This view was held by many Jewish converts who sought to protect God’s sole divinity, but it was never Christianity.
The other heresy was Docetism. This was popular among the Greeks who felt that flesh and matter were evil, therefore, Jesus could not have actually been in the flesh, but merely appeared to be in the flesh. He was not really human, but just appeared to be, like a hologram. This was more prevalent in John’s community. It was so important that it is directly addressed in John’s first epistle as the very means by which we judge what is true from what is false:
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. —1 John 4:1-3
John rules out both Adoptionism and Docetism, proclaiming the faith that was from the beginning: that Jesus is certainly divine—The Word made flesh—and also fully human.
Virgin Birth: YES!
The Christian faith has also affirmed from day one that Mary was a virgin—not merely a “young woman”—when Christ was conceived in her womb. This is a necessary doctrine, because Jesus had no earthly, human father. If he did, then we all fall into Adoptionism perforce.
I’ll save more for Advent, and I know that you—like me—are thankful that we won’t be singing any Christmas Carols today in September! †