Relevant Verses: John 1:1-18
Theme: The Power of the Word
Leading Question: What image does “the Word was God” convey for you?
The prologue is the most profound statement about Jesus’ identity in the New Testament, identifying Jesus as the “Word” (logos). The Greek term logos had a conceptual background in Judaism and in Greek philosophy. In the Old Testament, God’s word is the dynamic force of his will. The psalmist declares, “By the word (logos) of the Lord were the heavens made” (Psalm 33:6). God speaks and it is done (Isa 55:11). In Greek philosophy, logos was used of the divine reason which brought unity and order to the cosmos. The Jewish philosopher Philo identified the logos as the messenger of God, mediator between God and creation. Similar imagery appears in the personification of Wisdom found in the book of Proverbs (Prov 8) and later Jewish Wisdom Literature (Sirach; Wisdom of Solomon). Wisdom was present with God before creation and comes to teach human beings.
Question: What are you wondering about when you read the first words in John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word”?
Some have suggested that the prologue is an early Christian hymn which was incorporated into the Gospel. As a hymn, “In the beginning” stirs up resonances to the creation text in Gen 1:1. These words do not only start a book, but they set out the theological themes that are central to the Gospel of John. What follows is going to have something to do with creation. God is about creating, about life, about abundant life. God is a life-giver at every turn in this story. So is Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” reveals where Jesus came from, his inherent relationship with God, and his identity as God.
One of the most intriguing characteristics of the poem’s initial verses is how it uses a method known as “staircase parallelism,” in which each line builds on the one that comes before it. This is done by repeating the last word of the previous line as the first word in the following line. This is easier to see in Greek, but literally translated, it goes like this (note the repeated words at the end and beginning of lines, which are underlined):
In the beginning was the Word;
And the Word was with God;
And God was the Word….
In him was Life;
And the Life was the Light of humans
And the Light shines in the Darkness
And the Darkness has not over come it.
In the Gospel of John, the term logos was probably chosen because of the rich conceptual Greek and Jewish background.
The Gospel takes up the logos of the Greek stoics, links it to the Jewish “theme of creation by word and turns it into a cosmic code and then into a person … The Logos in John corresponds to Wisdom in Proverbs. As in the case of Wisdom, the identity of the Logos traffics between the ‘what’ and the ‘who,’ between an abstraction and a personification. But John presses further: the Logos is not mere personified methaphor but an actual life-and-and-blood person, the divine made carnal (John 1:14)” (William P. Brown, Sacred Sense, p. 114).
Theologians call this, High Christology. The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes about the prologue, “Jesus was the incarnated Logos that was equal with God in the beginning, before the universe existed; he was the one who created the universe. And that one became a human. It’s an amazing poem.”
It is not through the transmission of facts about God that Jesus makes God known to humanity. Rather, it is through the personal, incarnate revelation of Jesus that God becomes known to humanity. This is the bold and fundamental claim that the Ggospel of John makes.
The Life-giving Power of the Word
As in the Genesis account of creation, God creates through speech. The audacious claim of John’s Gospel is that God’s life-creating speech-act, which called the entire universe into existence, is to be identified with the Word-become-human-flesh, to whom the rest of the Gospel narrative will bear witness: Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, God as creator serves as bookends for the entire Gospel. In John 20:22, Jesus appears to the disciples as they huddle behind locked doors. He “breathes on them” the Holy Spirit. In the Greek language, this is the same verb used in Gen 2:7 (emphysao, Septuagint), “the LORD God formed the human being from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living being.” God’s life-giving, creative activity surrounds the Gospel of John.
Question: What might be the implications of the Word “becoming flesh” for us who are of “flesh”?
Question: What other metaphors do you recognize in John 1:1–18 and what do they evoke?
Question: What persuades you about Jesus in the prologue of John’s Gospel?
Perhaps it is not first about a Christology, but about humanity’s response to Jesus as the Light being welcomed to becoming children of God—a gift offered to all who believe in his name. This is seen in the structure of the prologue where verse 12 is at the center: “But all who received him, who belieived in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” From that standpoint, the whole emphasis of the prologue is the response of faith to Jesus as the Word and Light, to which all are invited as children of God.
