The God Who is Known

John 1.(1-9) 10-18

January 3, 2021

When I was in seminary, we took some quizzes in New Testament class that were based on the Gospels. In these quizzes we had to identify which gospel a given passage was from. We took Matthew and Mark first and then Luke and John. After the first quiz there was much angst about how we were going to tell Luke from John. We had enough trouble with Matthew and Mark. Someone said that we needed to remember that if a text sounded like Matthew or Mark then it was from Luke. If it sounded like high philosophy, then it was from John. Of course, that is a bit of an oversimplification, but when one looks at today’s text from John, one can see how that would be the case. John uses high sounding words and phrases to tell that Jesus is God. But he also uses those same phrases and words to tell us that Jesus was also human, that the God who was in the beginning came down to earth to be born, raised and live as a human being.

“In the beginning”. Such powerful words. They begin the first book of the Bible and they begin this text for today. What we read is a prologue for the fourth gospel, a prologue that tells us just what we are going to be reading and hearing in the text that is before us. And it opens with the words of beginning. In Genesis, the beginning is the telling of the story of creation. How God made everything that was and that would be. That creation was still being created and that God was still at work in the world.

John opens with the same words as Genesis and tells that there is the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God. Not a god, but God. We are told that nothing came into being without the Word. That in him in the Word was life and light. And the darkness, as great as it seems at times, will never overcome the light. So this is how John begins his gospel.

He goes further to introduce us to John the Baptist and to tell us that the true light which will enlighten the world was coming into the world. But then, when the light came into the world, the world did not know the light that came to it. The one who created the world was not known by the creation.

There was an even more astonishing thing that happened. The light came to what was his own (his own land or home) and his own people did not know him. The ones who were looking for God to come and to save them did not recognize who was in their midst and they rejected him.

But there is also a promise. In verse 12 it says that those who do believe in him will receive the right to be called children of God. Not that they are like him, Jesus, for he is the one and only Son of God, one of a kind. But that they will be able to claim adoption by God in being the children of God.

Then we come to the most crucial verse of the entire prologue. Verse 14 tells us that the Word (used again for the first time since verse 1) came and lived among us. That things have gone from the eternal to the temporal, or to the human level. In the first part of the verse there are several important pieces that need to be looked at.

First, the Word became flesh. In the first part of the prologue the verb use was “to be” (the Word was…) but now the verb used is to become. That God actually became one of humanity and lived among us. That God took on flesh, skin and bones, the very things that make up human beings. That God did not take on a disguise like pagan gods did in the stories that were told about them, but actually came and was known to the people who were following.

Second is that the Word lived. The word translated as lived actually is saying that the Word tabernacled among us. This is going right back to the time of the exodus and the children of Israel in the wilderness. There they were traveling with the tabernacle, a portable place of worship where the glory of the LORD dwelt when they were not traveling. For John to say that the Word tabernacled is to say that the glory of the LORD is living among us and that God is with us, being known to us.

Third, the use of the plural us. Before this the terms used were not personal. Now, they are. The use of the personal pronoun takes the prologue from observation to confession: The Word is not just living in the world, but living among us and dwelling with us.

There is something personal here. God came down and became human. Not just a human but a human of a specific group. God became a Jew in a time when Jews were not viewed in the most positive light. And God became one. But also God came down and shared the life of a human being. Shirley Guthrie in his book Christian Doctrine, says this about the first part of verse 14: the incarnation “…is the story of a radical invasion of God into the kind of real world where we live all year long-a world where there is political unrest and injustice, poverty, hatred, jealousy, and both the fear and the longing that things could be different.” (Guthrie, 228)

John goes further to tell us that the real man is also the real God, full of grace and truth. That we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father. The glory that had been over the tabernacle in the wilderness now walked with us.

John uses the word grace just four times in his gospel. All four times are in the prologue in verses 14, 16 and 17. Every use of grace illustrates that God coming down in Jesus is something that only God can and will do. and that leads us to verse 18.

We are told in verse 18 that no one has ever seen God. Moses asked to see God and was shown God’s “back” but did not see the full glory as God said that no one could see that and live. Now, in Jesus, the one and only Son, we have seen God and God is made known to us. We can know God personally and know the glory of God through the one who has made God known to us, Jesus Christ.

There are times when we do not want to be known. Times when we do something that is embarrassing or painful. Times when we just want to be left alone and have no one know who or what we are. These times occur more often than we care to admit, but then there are other times when we definitely want to be known: when we star in a show, when we make the big deal, when we are lauded for our talents. In those times we go out of our way to be known by those around us.

God wanted and wants to be known. We are still celebrating the Christmas season when we proclaim that God came down to live among us as a tiny baby. What John tells us is a Christmas story of sorts. It is the story of how the creator came to live among us. How Jesus showed us the glory of God yet lived in this messy world where we all live, doing the same things and living the same life that we all do day after day. And not only that, but he understood everything about us. That just because he was God did not mean that he left all the living of earthly life on another plain. No, Jesus came and made God known to us through the life that he lived. The God who created the world, whose glory shown over the tabernacle, who could not be seen and a person live, is now the God who is known to us in Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.