John 1:1-18
OK folks, I realize it's already Sunday as I'm posting this - could it be a New Year's Resolution is in order? I'll just say I won't make it a habit. (Did I ever write sermons on Sunday morning before church? Yes, yes I did.) Anyway, on to the text! It is fitting that we have the prologue to John's gospel today, as this rounds out the Christmas Gospel readings nicely: we had Luke's birth story on Christmas Eve, Matthew's last Sunday, and today we have John's take on Jesus' origins. It is notable first off that John skips the whole question of Jesus' birth - presumably that's because he has bigger fish to fry (pun on John 21:9-14 fully intended). John is not particularly concerned with Jesus' human lineage, e.g., with showing how he's descended from David. He does not name Jesus' mother, although she figures pretty heavily in the story (wedding at Cana 2:1-11, crucifixion 19:25-27). And the first followers do identify Jesus as "son of Joseph from Nazareth" (1:45).
The bigger fish with which John is concerned is Jesus' divine lineage - his origins as the Son of God. Accordingly, John reaches all the way back to the beginning, alluding quite explicitly to the opening verse of Genesis with his "In the beginning was the Word..." He does something quite clever here, as he not only makes a statement about the Son of God (that he was present with God at the beginning) but about the whole creation story (that the Son of God was part of it). I would note at this point that the idea of the preexistent Son of God taking flesh in Jesus was apparently a pretty early one - see for example Philippians 2:6, only 25-30 years after Jesus. Anyway, what John is saying here is quite profound: that the Word, or the Son of God, has been present with God, or the Father, from the very beginning and has been intimately involved in everything that has happened. As John says, "without him not one thing came into being." I think this is a really important point for us, because it means that as Christians we mustn't make sharp distinctions between the Old Testament and the New; if the Word has been around all along, then the Word is implicated in all of it. Once again I'll give a little shout-out for the theologian Robert Farrar Capon, who has written quite a bit on this subject--see, for example, his book The Fingerprints of God.
The other thing that John accomplishes with this text is that he introduces us to some of the images and concepts that are going to be explicated in the rest of his gospel. "Life," for instance, which Jesus starts talking about with Nicodemus (see 3:15) and with the religious authorities (5:19-47); which also becomes the point of Jesus' discussions with the Samaritan woman (4:14), the crowds who are fed (6:35), and Martha (11:25); and which is finally identfied as the whole point of John's story (20:31). Then there's "Light," which comes up in the Nicodemus passage (3:19-21) and is discussed further in chapter 8. There's also new birth (verse 13), which again Jesus discusses with Nicodemus and which I think is implied in Jesus' subsequent encounters with the Samaritan woman, the man born blind (chapter 9), Lazarus (chapter 11), and others. There's belief (verse 12), which is everywhere in John's gospel. There's "glory" (verse 14) which comes up again at 2:11, 5:41-44, 7:14-18, 8:54, 12:27-32 and all of chapter 17. And finally, there's "Word" (logos)itself: Jesus' words are all-important in John's gospel. As Jesus says in 14:23, "Those who love me will keep my word (logos), and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them."
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