Reflections on John 1:14 for Advent and Christmas

I wrote this on 18 December 2009 as an Advent reflection, but I think it is also one that I can share on Christmas Eve. I did not include footnotes here, but I did include the names of the theologians and scholars upon whom I was drawing. I wrote this as a result of the research I have been doing recently for my PhD. I welcome comments and dialogue. Jane

_______________________________________________

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14, NRSV)

It is believed that the author of the Prologue to the Gospel of John (“let’s call him ‘John’”) drew upon many Scripturally-based, religious (Jewish), and philosophical ideas. His use of the “Word” or “logos” can be understood as reflecting Stoic ideas about the logos, popular Stoic and Platonic philosophy, and ideas about the logos that John seems to have shared with Philo of Alexandria, whose life overlapped with Jesus’ life, and to some extent John’s. John may also have drawn upon ideas about the “word” from passages in the Hebrew Scriptures like Ps. 33:6, which says, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of their mouth.”

In John’s day, there were many ideas “in the air” (Samuel Terrien and others), just as there are now, and religious people could hold ideas that stemmed from multiple traditions and influences. Some Jews and early Christians, including those to whom John was addressing his good news, would have been familiar with ideas from popular Platonism and Stoicism, Hellenistic Judaism, and the Pentateuch and Prophetic and Wisdom writings in the LXX. John could have drawn on any or all of these ideas when he wrote the Prologue and talked about “the Word” or “logos.”

But there was something unique about John. Something Christian. Something about the Word and Jesus Christ that was different for Jew and Greek. John said “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” This was good news and “new news.” And it went against Greek and Jewish ideas about God and God’s relationship with people and the world.

As Raymond Brown, Leon Morris, and others have said, the Greeks were not expecting God to join them in the world. They aspired, in Brown’s words, “to be joined with God in His universe" (Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Bible, p. 31). The idea that God or the logos would become flesh was foreign to them, and no doubt offensive. Why would God want to become a man? And why would they want God to become man and join them in their earthly abode, rather than God letting them join him in God’s abode?

The idea of the Word becoming flesh, or God becoming man, was also different from Jewish beliefs at the time. John’s early readers may have thought about Moses and (Lady) Wisdom when they heard that the Word had become flesh and lived among us. The Greek word that John used for “lived among us” has the meanings of “lived, dwelled, pitched a tent, made a dwelling,” and is related to the word for “tent.” It would have brought to mind the Exodus traditions about the tabernacle and Moses, as well as Wisdom’s words in Sirach 24:8: “Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.’” God did sometimes make God’s presence or God’s wisdom reside among people, in the tabernacle or in a tent. That part they knew.

But John was telling them good news about God doing a completely new thing. John was talking about the Incarnation. This was a stumbling block for Jew and for Greek, a new way of God expressing God’s wisdom and love, a new way of God relating to human beings and the world, a new way of God making God’s presence known among us.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

I love Terrien’s words about this verse (Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology, p. 420):

“Here lies the unprecedented character of the statement. ... When [John] sang ‘And we have seen his glory,’ he testified that ‘the Word’ had lived on this earth at a particular time, and he confided that he had sensorially perceived and psychologically apprehended the most extraordinary spectacle: Divine Wisdom inseparable in his mind from the Divine Word was seen in the flesh of a man. The presence of God was for a time contained in a human person.”

John had seen this, or was relying on the first-hand testimony of the disciple who had seen it. He had seen and been with and followed the Word who had become flesh and lived among us. He had seen him in the flesh. He had seen his glory. He had seen his transfiguration. He had seen him die. He had seen the empty tomb. And he lived to tell the story.

This is truly a new thing. The Word became flesh. God’s son, “the father’s only son,” came to live among us. The Word who was with God and who was God was also with us.

This Word had pitched a tent among us, and dwelled with us, dwelling bodily in and as a human being. This Word broke through the barrier between heaven and earth, between God and human beings, between God and all of God’s creation. This Word chose to live a life like ours, so that we could live a life like God’s, so that we could indeed eventually go to live with God. But until that time, God is with us, in our world, in Spirit now as he was in the flesh. “And we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

This was new news in John’s day for Jew and Greek.

And it is new news and good news for us today.

Let us live to tell the story, in the way we live, in our own “words,” and in our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies.

AMEN.

Introduction

I started this blog on Saturday morning, July 18, 2009. I do not yet know what I am doing, or what I will be doing, but this is a first step forward. Jane