The Gospel of Mark begins with Jesus as an adult. “In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” In one sentence, Mark’s Gospel skips through three chapters of narrative that is told in Matthew and Luke.
Matthew and Luke both begin before Jesus was born, explaining prophecies about the coming Messiah and the announcement of the angel of the Lord to Mary, who was just a girl. There are genealogies which describe Jesus’ heritage as a descendant of King David, and even though most of us find genealogies in Holy Scripture rather tedious and dry, they are, after all, a part of Holy Scripture, and every genealogy has its own story or stories to tell. Each opens up a wealth of teaching from the Word of God.
John’s gospel, however, begins in the beginning. The very beginning. The setting is the creation event itself, and what is unique about this passage, which we call the Prologue to the Gospel of John, is that Jesus is not named here. To name something defines it, in a way. It categorizes it, puts it into a box with a label. John wants us to remove that label and take Jesus out of our box and think about Him in a different way.
Jesus is the Word. He was with God in the very beginning. In fact, He was God. Where Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t get around to explaining this to their readers for several chapters, John lays it out plainly right up front. The Word is God, and Jesus is the Word, although that is not immediately apparent, not until John the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him and declares, “This is he of whom I said, after me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me (v. 30).”
This is the gospel, packaged very neatly into eighteen verses. Perhaps John wrote it that way because he was, in truth, re-interpreting an old story. By the time John’s Gospel was circulating, Matthew, Mark and Luke had already been around for over 20 years, and even then it was at least 20 years since Jesus’ resurrection.
The people already knew the story, so John’s job was not to tell it to them, but to open their minds to understand the story in a new way. He was a preacher with a congregation, not an evangelist, although evangelism is always at the very heart of the gospel.
Jesus is intimately related to all of creation, and Jesus is intimately related to all of us. Verse 10 explains that “...the world was made through him…”
Again, we don’t get stuff like that in the other Gospels. Jesus has always been, and without that description, without John’s Gospel, we could easily see Jesus as nothing more than God’s offspring, His creation. But Jesus is God. He was there in the beginning, and all of “this” came into being through Him. This wording should sound very familiar to you in another way as well. It is the language of pregnancy.
If Jesus were to have a child, it would be us.
This is the first of four key purposes of Jesus, four interrelated themes about His being as the Word of God. The Word of God is our Father.
The second purpose of Christ, revealed in John’s Prologue, is that Jesus is, for us, the source of revelation and grace. He is “the true light which enlightens everyone (v.9),” and He is “full of grace and truth (v. 14).” The Word of God is our Mentor. More than just a friend, more even than just a Father, He sees potential within us that we cannot see in ourselves, and nurtures us in it.
Jesus was intimately involved in our creation and our nurture and growth, but the world rejected Him. Vv. 10-11 say that he was in the world, and that even though the world came into being through Him, still the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own would not accept Him.
Do you know what it feels like for your child to say to you, “I hate you? I don’t want anything to do with you?” Can you imagine what that might feel like? Wouldn’t you do anything to bring him or her back to you? Wouldn’t you give anything?
The relationship that Jesus Christ had with his own children was broken, and lying in ruins. They did not know Him, their own Father! And so “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” writes John (v.14). God has always been intimately connected, related to His creation. He has always been personally involved in His children’s lives, as should every father be.
He is not up there on His throne, judging us and manipulating us for His own good pleasure. He is here among us, as one of us. John calls Jesus the Word of God, and what does “word” mean? In Greek, logos literally refers to an accounting or an understanding. In English it means “the study of” something. Psychology, biology, theology.
But more basically than that, ‘word’ is a means of communication. Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the communication of God to us, He is God’s means of relating to His creation.
Which brings us to the fourth key purpose of Jesus Christ in John’s Prologue.
“And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (Vv. 16-17).”
Does this mean that the Law is not truth? Does this mean that there was no grace before Christ? No, of course not. But a relationship with a person is very different from a relationship with a law. The Law, the Torah as it was called, guided the people, it ruled the people and set down a standard of living in righteousness. It is objective and impersonal.
Jesus Christ, however, is a person, and guides us in our understanding of the Law. He demonstrates for us how we are to follow His Law. We can know the Law, but we can connect with Christ, we can understand the Law through Him, and so learn that the journey to Heaven is not so far as we might have otherwise believed.
For Jesus to fulfill all these purposes, “he must be of God in the fullest possible sense (Karl Kuhn. Commentary on John 1:1-18 http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1960, accessed 20 December 2013).”
But Jesus cannot also identify with humanity if He is not human, and so He took upon Himself not only our humanity, but all of our humanity. Our acceptance as God’s Chosen, and our rejection as God’s Justice.
One commentator wrote:
For John, the scandal of particularity is not just that in Jesus the Divine becomes “incarnate and dwells among us. The scandal is also that the transcendent Word becomes so deeply enmeshed in our twisted affairs, that he is even willing to endure the humiliation and hatred embodied in the cross. The Word...embraces this, to enlighten all those who would receive him. He comes to his own and loses his life for them, that they too might become children of God and, like him, close to the Father’s heart (ibid.).”
As Advent draws to a close, and we welcome the Christmas season into our homes and our lives, let us praise God for what He has done for us, what He is doing within us even now, and for what He will bring to completion through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
