The Word became Flesh John 1:1-18 NLCC 23.12.18
Introduction
Whilst John 1:1-18 (often called the prologue) is a regular Christmas reading in traditional churches it seems far removed from the delightful nativity scenes that can still be found in the secular cathedrals of Australia i.e. shopping centres. It is a teaching desperately needed if the Church is to be recaptured by the biblical vision of God’s coming amongst us. For in passing from an institutional pillar of society to at best tolerated Western Christianity has an identity crisis. If God becoming human, the Incarnation, means the divine being has entered his mission field, only a much deeper sharing in the Incarnation can transform the Church from a largely comfortable organisation into a mission force. Until this we will continue to witness delusions as varied as the Uniting Church striving to be “relevant” by embracing same-sex marriage to imagining that if Franklin Graham can come to Australia next year and preach like his dad did 60 years ago the spiritual tide might turn in our nation. As long as it is possible for general society to sees groups like Hillsong as marketing a particular lifestyle choice they can never really understand who Jesus is. Until the stronghold of an easy going comfortable materialistic lifestyle is broken over the Church the spiritual climate in Australia will go from bad to worse. Thankfully the remedy to worldliness is found in today’s passage with its witness to the full materiality of the Son of God. The real struggle over the identity of Jesus amongst Bible-believing Christians isn’t over Jesus being God but in understanding what it means for him to be human. (I can still recall my surprise when my first-year theology tutor in discussing the Incarnation remarking that Jesus went to the toilet.) Insight into the unlimited identification of the Son of God with fallen humanity is the key to the Church reclaiming her identity as Christ’s light bearing Body in the world. We must not rush to John 3:16 before understanding John 1:14 lest we rob the cross of its power; what Jesus has done depends entirely on who he is.
Who has Come
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
Whereas John’s Jewish readers might think of the creative word in Genesis through whom the world was made (Gen 1:3, 6, 9; Ps 33:6) and his Greek readers of the Logos as the ordering principle of the cosmos John’s Word is a full Person. “In the beginning was the Word” means “When the beginning began the Word already was.” And for the Word to “with God” means he conveys God’s eternal intentions for the world. In John’s Gospel the dynamic relationship between the Word and God is conveyed the Son’s unlimited communication with the Father. In saying that “the Word was God” John gives us something much more than a proof text to use against people like Jehovah’s Witnesses, he means the Word has forever been revealing God within God’s own joy-filled life. It is the very nature of God to reveal himself in his Word.
If “all things were made” through the Word (v.3) and if as Hebrews affirms the preserving activity of the Word in the world, “God….sustains all things by the Word of his power” (1:3 cf. Ps 19:4; Rom 1:19-20) there can be no purely silent spaces in creation. Why do so many people then feel that God is not there for them? The answer becomes clearer as our passage presses on to even deeper things about life in the Word.
Both life and life-giver
4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
The light spoken at creation dispelled the primeval darkness (Gen 1:1-3) but the light of the Word is the original eternal light of God. All living things draw their life from the life of the Word. Paul preaches to the Athenians, God “gives…life and breath and everything….in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25, 28). But suddenly we read that for no apparent reason this beautiful life-giving light is assailed by darkness; 5 “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it….” In his triumph the light as verse 9 testifies “enlightens everyone”. If the light of the life of the Word grounds our very humanity how is it that 3 million Australians are afflicted by depression and anxiety https://www.beyondblue.org.au/, and that an even higher number (5.6m) suffer from loneliness, especially at Christmas https://www.smh.com.au/national/red-cross-launches-new-campaign-to-fight-loneliness-this-christmas-20171210-h023jh.html? Jesus’ own explanation for such things is devastating, “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come to the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” (John 3:20). By progressively rejecting the gospel which “brings life and immortality to light” (2 Tim 1:10) our nation has plunged itself into darkness and without a revival of the Word things will become even blacker in the lives of multitudes. John goes on with this theme of rejection.
The Coming of the Word Polarises
vv.10-11 “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”
he Gospels are stories of how God’s own people, Israel, rejected Jesus as the Light of the world (John 8:12; 12:35). John’s Gospel especially emphasises this. Its possible to pick up the grief in Jesus’ heart when he says, “‘They hated me without a cause.’” (John 15:25). If you have ever been rejected without reason know what this pain feels like. The Gospel story remains offensive to many Jewish people. The European Jewish Congress recently demanded that new editions of the New Testament place “trigger warnings” in their margins (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trigger-warnings-needed-for-bible-xfbpzt7xz) John’s Gospel does highlight Jesus’ rejection by the Jewish leaders not because he is antisemitic but because he’s in touch with God’s grief caused by sinners rejecting the purity of the light of God in the Messiah. But not everyone rejected Jesus.
“12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
Until the coming of the Christ only the people of Israel were recognised by the true God as his adopted covenant children (Ex 4:22; Rom 9:3). Now by grace salvation is open to us all.
How the Word has Come
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
When John says “the Word became flesh” he does not mean the Son of God entered into an already existing human life whose flesh covered him like an overcoat. Neither does he mean God turned into a human in such a way that he stopped being God. The eternal Word became Jesus of Nazareth without ceasing in any way to be God. In an incomprehensible but glorious way humanity has been united to deity. The Incarnation is no mere miracle, it is a transformation in God himself. The “how” of the Incarnation is unanswerable, the “why” is that it expresses the limitless unconditional saving love of God for sinners.
God has become forever, as Paul says, “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). In meditating on the eternal glory of God concentrated in the manger many of older hymn writers expressed a profound theology. In “Let earth and heaven combine” Charles Wesley pronounces, “Our God contracted to a span, Incomprehensibly made man.” and in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate Deity, Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel. Or so deeply Luther in “To shepherds as they watched by night”, “Oh, then rejoice that through His Son/God is with sinners now at one; Made like yourselves of flesh and blood, Your brother is the eternal God.” Compared to the sheer majesty of these Spirit-inspired Christ-exalting songs many contemporary choruses lack all proportion to the greatness of the Incarnation.
In mediating on such things we are in the realm of what Paul calls, “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph 3:8) and the “unspeakable gift” of God (2 Cor 9:15). The saints of old were inspired with heated hearts to write and sing about the Incarnation because they truly understood that in becoming “flesh” God entered into our fallen condition of “flesh and blood” with a body, soul, spirit, mind, will and emotions subject to weakness, temptation and mortality (Heb 2:14-15). Later in John we read more about the “flesh” Jesus became; that which is “born of the flesh” must be “born again” (3:5-7) and in the Lord’s own words, “the flesh is useless” (John 6:63). It is remarkable beyond words that God took on such flesh!
I hate those mythological hymns that picture a passive, docile baby Jesus whereas the Incarnation is the expression of the infinite dynamism of the life of the eternal God. When “Away in a manger” says, “But little Lord Jesus No crying he makes” it denies that the Word really became our sort “flesh” of flesh; the real baby Jesus was not immune from diarrhoea , constipation distress and eventual death. To save us the Son of God had to fully embedded in our rebellious flesh in order to carry it all the way to extinction; Paul is clear, “God…. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3).
In this weakened state the Word “dwelt among us”, or more accurately, “tabernacled among us” much like the glory of God came to abide in the midst of Israel (Ex 25:8-9; Ezek 43:7; Joel 3:17; Zech 2:10). But the coming of God in Jesus was not like a temporary burning bush or a glory which could depart the Jerusalem temple prior to its destruction, the Word’s dwelling in humanity is forever .
“16 And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
The gracious fulness of the Word as flesh is completely opposite to the sort of spectacular display the Jews, and pagans, expected for the coming of a Messiah or god into their midst. In “outgrowing” Jesus our culture necessarily has reverted to an obsession with the spectacular e.g. Australia Day fireworks Perth, 300,000 people. The average Western megachurch is dominated by the need to provide the spectacular. To have a revelation of the amazing lowliness of the Incarnation is a powerful countercultural shock from which you will never recover. We are now at the intimate pinnacle of our passage;
18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is in the bosom/heart of the Father, he has made him known.
The Word doesn’t reside in the arm of the Father, a symbol of power, nor in the mind of the Father, conveying knowledge, but in the heart of the Father from which his love flows. I clearly remember being at the Iguassu Falls in South America at a time when watching 3 million litres of water per second were flowing relentlessly over its chasm and sensing this was like the everlasting waves of the love of God, poured into the world with the coming of Jesus. In Jesus God’s love is presented to the world undiluted and undeflected (Deut 10:15; 1 John 4:8). In his flesh the Son of God converts the “unknown God” into the known Father, (Acts 17:23; John 17:3-5) this is his glory and it climaxes in the cross.
The cross as the medium of divine glory is a focus in John’s Gospel (17:4-5). ““The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified (says Jesus). 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit….Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”…. (Jesus continues) And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33 He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.” (12:23, 28, 32-33). John’s Jesus is crucified in glory. Whilst John does not record Christ’s cry of forsakenness from the cross found in Matthew and Mark (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34) he surely understood it was the one dark space in all creation where the Word felt he was unheard by God. I have always treasured the connection between the cradle and the cross. Around 1973 I was involved in organising a protest march through Adelaide against the materialism of Christmas. We headed it with a big banner, “Jesus was born to die!”
The glory which irradiated the sky over Bethlehem appears precisely because a Saviour has been born who will be sacrificed in the flesh to save the world (Luke 2:9-11; 1 Tim 3:16). In rushing to the cross, sometimes via signs and wonders, without meditating on what it meant for God to become a human being, the Australian Church has condemned itself to an immature glory. I recall being in a prayer meeting when a young man suddenly cried out to the Lord, “Our affluence is killing us.”, he later went out as a missionary, to Yemen of all places. Jesus being born in a filthy smelly stable, I grew up with stables in our back yard, is a prophetic message about the character of the Christian life. Someone sent me a link the other day about a US pastor buying his wife a Lamborghini; well I already have such stories, some quite local, about BMW’s, Audi’s, Aston Martin’s and so on. Men interested in “big boys toys” know nothing of the message of the Word that crucified flesh is the way of glory. Our natural desires for success, comfort and prestige melt away before the wonder of the real crucified and glorified humanity of the Son of God.
Conclusion
The inexpressibly good news of Christmas is that when the Word became flesh God by grace dignified fallen humanity taking it on the path to crucifixion and upwards into his own eternal glory. “from his fullness we have all received” John says, “grace upon grace”. Are you personally living in the goodness of such overflowing grace today and every day?
I am afraid, especially as I observe the decline in Bible-knowledge across our churches, many of us are no longer thrilled by the truth of God becoming human, that our hearts are no longer on fire with undying zeal to listen to the Word who is life and light and everything. If we are comfortable “lifestyle Christians” rather than following the Word in his way of lowliness we have lost our first love (Rev 2:4). The Church in the West can only recover her identity as a Body unconformed to this world but alive in Christ when we accept that loving sacrifice is the heart of the Christmas message. Let me close with an example and a challenge.
Shortly before being executed by communist soldiers in China in 1934 two OMF missionaries (John and Elisabeth Stam) penned a letter to their children which ended with line that has become famous, “no sacrifice is too great to make for him who gave himself for us”. The spirit of unlimited sacrifice born into the world over 2,000 years ago still fires the flames of faith in China; but where are those who will embrace the sacrifice of Christ for Australia. In the light of the immeasurable cost to the Word in his becoming flesh what sacrifice will you offer the Lord today that his saving glory might be revealed amongst us? If you choose this difficult but glorious way then the presence of God in the Word will become the prevailing condition of your life.