THIS Sunday offers a selection between two mighty Gospels. We can mark the Epiphany with Matthew 2.1-12, and the journey of the magi. Or we will keep what seems like a more humdrum option: “Christmas 2”. But Christmas 2 gives us the mightiest Gospel of all: one so fundamental to the Christian identity that it was read in most celebrations of the fuller type of Roman Catholic mass because the Last Gospel. It is sometimes called the Prologue, or “introduction”, of John.
Trying to say something useful about this extraordinary text is intimidating. It cries out for thorough, detailed, explanation of this “Word”. Shreds and tatters of Greek ideas about truth and being flutter past the clutching fingers of my mind. Fragments of Jewish thought clamour to make their contribution to the edifice of meaning.
And yet this Gospel should be “preached”. It is just not only to be heard, but additionally explained and explored, in order that we will take it to heart and live by it. When I first studied ancient Greek history, I felt as if every undeniable fact that I attempted to soak up had no backdrop, no context. I used to be impatient to recover from this ignorance. But I ultimately had to simply accept that it might take time to orientate myself.
It takes time to learn the meanings of John’s Prologue, too. His Gospel got here from a community of Christians. Although it was written by a human being, its teaching — as with other scripture texts — is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3.16). So, perhaps, as a substitute of ploughing ahead with Greek Stoic philosophy, or Jewish Alexandrian theology, we will ask an easy query: What is the issue that John 1.1-18 sets out to deal with?
Most of the New Testament consists of two sorts of writings. There are narratives — just like the Gospels — which tell a story with characters, a plot, and dramatic features reminiscent of reversal and recognition. Stories, as I actually have said greater than once here, are a strong method to communicate truth to us, because they get ideas across when it comes to human experience, arousing emotions of pity, fear, and love.
Then there are conceptual writings. These wrestle with the meanings within the stories: we meet Paul as he tries to make sense of the guarantees of God under the old covenant; and James, arguing an ethics of compassion based on Christ’s example and teaching; and the anonymous creator of Hebrews, who quarries ancient writings for tactics of understanding what God has wrought in Christ, and who Christ is.
John’s Prologue puzzles us, since it is a bit of theology stuck on the front of a book that otherwise looks like a story. The closest parallels to it within the Synoptic Gospels are the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, each of which try to stake a theological in addition to a historical claim for Jesus.
But the genealogies should be the least-read sections of any of the Gospels: dull stuff for us, who take Jesus’s Davidic descent as a given. Their content is of scholarly quite than spiritual interest. John’s Prologue, however, draws us with its poetry, attracts us with its vision of a world beyond this visible one which we inhabit, and at last captivates us with a single sentence that brings all three of those elements right into a single point of sunshine: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us.”
The problem that John’s Prologue is doing its best to unravel is “Who is Jesus?” If we imagine ourselves hearing the ultra-familiar words for the primary time, we could also be surprised that they start with what’s most opaque and mysterious: “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” This Word’s identity then begins to be disclosed in stages, through references to earthly existence, still in mysterious, non-specific terms. At last, the reality is first hinted at, then confirmed: he has glory like a father’s only-begotten son, after which he’s fully revealed as “God the only-begotten Son”.
Jesus’s name is recorded only on the very end of the prologue, along with one other fragment of identity. He is Messiah: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth got here through Jesus Christ.” Now we’re fully prepared for locating, in all that follows, the Word, the Son, the Christ — and, yes, the human being, too.
