John 1: 6-14 January 26, 2021
6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light,
so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to
testify to the light. 9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10He was in the world, and the world came into
being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people
did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to
become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will
of man, but of God. 14And 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
This
sentence forms an interesting bridge between what comes before and what comes
after. Before, the true light…was coming
into the world. The true light is
Jesus. Now we are told ‘he was in the
world’. And if anticipating the game of
pronouns that can make reading the Bible intriguing, “He” who was in the world,
it was “him” that the world came into being through. So Jesus, not John. John testifies to the light, but is not the
light.
So why say the true light was coming but that he was in
the world? I would suggest mission and
man. Jesus entered the world at His
birth, which we celebrate at Christmas.
But aside from his birth, the wise men, his presentation at the temple
at eight days, and his return to the temple at age 12, we do not have much, if
anything, about Jesus before His baptism by John, before the Holy Spirit came
down upon him. So the man, Jesus, was in
the world, but the mission, to be the true light, that was starting here with
the recounting of the gospel.
“He” who is the true light, his power is reaffirmed as
that which brought the world into being.
Yet, the world did not know him.
This is the first of two limitations to his introduction to the
world. He was not known and then, in the
next sentence, he was not accepted by his own people. What I find helps in considering the bible is
looking to the opposites. What does that
mean? It means if the gospel writer is
telling us the world did not know him, that is as opposed to what? It is opposed to Jesus coming in the power and
glory of the Almighty? That entry of
Jesus into the world smacks of the pomp and circumstance of the Second Coming. The first coming was far more subdued.
This may be laid down to explain why those hearing the good
news of Jesus Christ for the first time had never heard of him before. There is a great explanation of the religious
system in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus. It was not that the Romans were religious
exactly so much as superstitious. Their
empire took over so many nations with so many gods and systems of belief, that
to absorb them into the empire, Rome took over their beliefs as well. There was a good deal of trying to line up
the other religions with their own. The
two dollar word for that is they sought to ‘syncretize’ the different
religions, merge them, find equivalents in them.
This kind of accommodation occurred in Jerusalem as
well. On the one hand, the Jews had only
One God, whom we know as God the Father in our trinitarian understanding of the
Lord. On the other, the Roman emperor
was considered a god and, therefore, to be worshipped by all the peoples of the
Empire. The bargain that was struck with
the Jews is that daily, a sacrifice was made in the temple for the
emperor. On the Jewish side, this was an
acknowledgement of their human overlord as inferior to their God, because he
was, through the priests, offering sacrifice to the Lord. On the Roman side, a sacrifice was being made
in the Emperor’s name in the holiest site in the Jewish faith. They were politically savvy enough to call
this satisfactory in acknowledging the godhood of the Emperor.
The other option to this religious-political bargain was
a full scale military invasion. That
would happen in 70 AD, where the Jewish rebellion’s official beginning was
marked by the cessation of sacrifice to the emperor in Jerusalem.
The religion that built around Jesus began as one strain
of thought within Judaism. When this
religion separated from Judaism, when it became identified as something
separate, his origin story was shared. He
comes from before creation, his power is that all came into being through him,
he is the manifestation of the Creator God now entering the world as the ‘true
light’. An assumption made about ancient
religions that I agree with is that it was presumed their gods had an indefinite lineage or traced their 'beginning' to some creative event in the distant past.
This introduction by the gospel writer is, in part,
establishing the deity of Jesus “despite” his late appearance in the religious record.
Sidebar: “…the world came into being through him…” is an
interesting grammatical form to tell us he created the world. He ‘created’ is an active verb form in the
third person in the past tense. It has
been accomplished. (First person is “I
created”, second person is “you created”). “Came into being” is the “ ‘simple past tense and
past participle’ of come into being.”, according to wordhippo.com.
Yes, they are synonymous, but there is something in the
expression ‘came into being’ that has a different spin, for me, than ‘created’. This is the danger of over-thinking in biblical
study. For me, to create something is to
make something new-there is a random quality to it. For the nerds out there, consider Vision, at
the end of the second Avengers movie, a ‘new life form’ in the MCU, something
unexpected. For something to come into
being, this phrasing implies, for me, that its being is already known. God knew what was going to be made when God
made it. It was something completely
expected. As was the fall of humanity,
as was humanity’s renewal in Jesus as the light of the world.
It is a small twist of phrase, but one that shows where
human language is trying to grasp the power and intent of God. No small feat.
Pastor Pete
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