When I was sixteen, I was waiting at the bus stop when a man came along with a Johnny Appleseed bag across his shoulders and handed me a copy of the Gospel of John. That evening I read John’s famous introduction for the first time, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
It sounded profound, but I was not sure how the term “word” was intended to be understood. It seemed to mean something more than just another entry in a dictionary.
Years later when I was first ordained, a fourth grader read the same passage at a Christmas Lessons and Carols service. Just before the service began he came to me and said, “This doesn’t make sense! How can something be with God and be God at the same time?”
Precisely. Normally identity and distinction are mutually exclusive. If I am with you, we may share space, but I remain distinct from you. If I am you, there is no such distinction -- and there is no one else in the room.
These opening words of John inscribe a unique and complex relationship between God and the Word, a relationship that is located within the being of God, but without compromising the oneness of the Biblical God.
John clearly identifies this “Word” with the creative utterance of God. The words, “in the beginning,” echo the opening passage of Genesis, “In the beginning, God…” God speaks a word, and the creation comes into being. Similarly, John presents the Word as the means by which creation comes into being, “all things were made through him (the Word), and without him was nothing made that was made.”
John also echoes Proverbs 8:22-31, which speaks of the Wisdom of God in strikingly personal terms as the one who is present at the beginning, and who shares in the work of creation “like a master workman.”
“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old….
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man.
(Proverbs 8:22, 29-31)
John appears to be thinking of Proverbs 8, but he does not use the term Sophia (or “wisdom’). Instead, he speaks of the Logos, which is translated as “Word,” and which had a wide range of meaning in Jewish and pagan philosophical circles at the time. The Logos was a divine principle of coherence and rationality, a sort of template of order and meaning that lay behind the created universe, and was also the source of human reason.
The opening words of John would have been thoroughly intelligible to John’s Jewish and Greco-Roman readers. Yet there was a significant difference. For Stoic philosophers, the Logos was impersonal and abstract, while for John, the Logos is the divine Son who “dwells in the bosom of the Father” (RSV). But the truly novel and radical claim is in verse 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.” (John 1:14)
It is suddenly clear that John is not merely invoking abstract philosophical concepts; he is talking about a concrete person, located in time and space, Jesus, the rabbi from Nazareth. And yet, in all his humanity, this Jesus has an eternal pre-existence.
In the readings that follow, other Biblical writers will also take this “long view” and speak of the pre-existent Christ, before we turn to the Old Testament expectation of the One who was to come.
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