Sunday, December 22, 2024

“In the Beginning Was the Word” (John 1:1-14), 12/22/24 John’s Gospel is very different from Matthew, Mark and Luke. There’s no Christmas story, no Mary and Joseph, no journey to Bethlehem, no shepherds, no magi, no star in the sky. Only the Word of God and then John, who interestingly is not called John the Baptist. In John’s Gospel, we go right from the Word of God, to John’s story and then to the calling of the disciples. Why no Christmas story? John and his community may not have heard the Christmas story when his gospel was being written. And also, in writing his gospel, he wanted to appeal to the Greek culture. The word logos (which means “word”) is Greek and that word was already 500 years old when John wrote about it in his gospel. One definition of it is “the principle and pattern that gave the world its character and coherence…” And then the idea of “the logos” as the Word of God was taken over by a Jewish theologian named Philo of Alexandria, who lived around the same time as the apostle Paul. Philo wanted to bring together Greek philosophy about how the universe was created, with the biblical stories of creation in Genesis, where God creates the world by his spoken word. Remember how the Book of Genesis begins? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And John starts his gospel out with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John is essentially saying, “hey all you Greek philosophers, here’s a new one for you. Pay attention! Because the Jewish people have something to tell you.” The two worlds (the Jewish world and the Greek world) were so different. They thought differently and they moved in different circles. They hardly interacted at all. But John wanted to bring them together around a very important idea. And that idea was, “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” Eugene Peterson in The Message, puts it this way, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” Do you like that idea? That Jesus, in a mysterious way, was not only with God and one with God at the beginning of creation, but is the way God chose to express himself or herself, in and as part of the created world, when Christ was born and moved into the neighborhood of a Palestinian village named Bethlehem 2000 plus years ago. That’s pretty cool.