The Word
Sermon by Peter Lindsey
9.30am, 4th January 2009
One of the Bible passages that has intrigued me for many years is John 1:1-5. For a long time I didn't fully understood exactly what it meant but now that I've studied it, and think I've got a reasonable handle on the meaning, I have to say it still impresses me greatly.
John's gospel was written some 30-40 years after the first three gospels, and is written from a much more spiritual basis. There are numerous historical events in the life and story of Jesus that John never even mentions and yet for many Christians the book is the most precious in the whole of the New Testament. It feeds their minds and nourishes their hearts. They find themselves closer to God and Jesus in John's Gospel than any other book in the world.
When Pastor Des asked me to take this service I started my preparation back in November with some fear and trepidation at the size of the task I had taken on. The more I read, the more I became convinced that John Chapter 1 probably has a year's worth of sermons in it so how was I going to do it justice in 20 minutes? As I pondered this, a Christmas card arrived from the Bible Society and surprise, surprise, it quoted the very verses from John 1 that I was working on. I took that as confirmation I was pointing in the right direction. Let's read the verses together and then I'll give you my thoughts on them one by one.
Read John 1:1-5
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2. He was with God in the beginning.
3. Through him all things were made.
4. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.
5. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
Obviously the word "Word" plays a pretty important part here and let me tell you why. By the time John decided that a fourth Gospel was necessary, the Christian Church, thanks to Paul and other missionaries, had spread to many countries which were altogether non-Jewish. In fact there were now many more Greeks than Jews. Because of this John felt that Christianity had to be re-stated not because its truth had changed but because the recipients had. They knew nothing of Old Testament kings and prophets and even the concept of a Messiah was strange to them. So how was John going to present a meaningful Gospel to two different cultures? After thinking about it for a long time he came up with a brilliant solution. You see, that word "Word" was so important in not just Jewish and Greek languages but also many others in the world. I looked it up in my two most reliable sources of information The Concise Oxford Dictionary and Encyclopaedia Britannica. In English the word "Word" has seven different meanings and not surprisingly comes from the Greek word "Logos" which means "word", "reason", "wisdom" and "plan" keep those explanations in your head!
Here is a summary of the Greek background thought about the "Word." It stems from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who lived in the same city as John Ephesus but about five centuries earlier. His basic idea was that everything in the world is in a state of flux. His great example was that you can never step into the same river twice. You can step in, step out, but when you step in a second time the water has moved on so it's a different river. The reason why the world is not in chaos even though it is constantly in flux, says Heraclitus, is that the changes are not haphazard. They are controlled and ordered because of the Logos - the Word, the Reason and Wisdom of God. He even stated that all opposites - like light and dark, hot and cold, right and wrong - are related because they actually define each other. For him the Logos was nothing less than the mind of God controlling the world and everyone and everything in it. The Greeks embraced this idea and by the time John wrote, they accepted the Logos as the power which keeps the world in order, the power which humans think and reason by, and the power by which they come into contact with God.
Now for the Jewish perception of Logos, The Word:- There are four main points:
1. The spoken word can actually do things to people. To the Hebrew it was fearfully alive, a unit charged with energy. It flies like a bullet, said one scholar. In the time of the Reformation, the preaching of John Knox was said to have put more courage into the hearts of people than 10,000 trumpets braying in their ears. And what about the effect that Winston Churchill's broadcasts had on the people during WW2?
2. The Old Testament is filled with the idea of power in words. In Genesis 1, the words "and God said" are used nine times. The Word of God is the creating power, the healing power and the doing power. Time and time again we read about the creative, acting, dynamic Word of God.
3. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew but by the time of Jesus, Hebrew was only spoken by scholars and priests. Ordinary people spoke Aramaic so in the Synagogue the scriptures were read first in Hebrew then verbally translated into Aramaic. The reader/translators had to be very careful that they did not attribute human thoughts and actions to God so they frequently used the phrase The Word of God to make it clear.
4. Lastly, like the Greeks, the "Word" also conveyed the meaning "reason" and "wisdom" which had an eternal existence. This is clear in books like Proverbs. So for John, pointing to Jesus Christ was a way for Jewish people to recognise all four meanings creating power, motivating power, truly Godly power and the reason and wisdom that gives light and life to every man and woman.
So using both of those approaches John very effectively communicated with two main cultures Jewish and Greek. Now let's have a more detailed look at the words he actually used:
Vs 1-2 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning".
John is talking about three things here:
1. When he says "the Word," he is referring to Jesus so it was Jesus who was with God in the beginning notice that the verse says "In the beginning", not "At the beginning." This implies that Jesus, the Word, was part of creation and was in existence before the world began. The world was from the beginning but the Word was in the beginning. These words are also a deliberate link to the first verse of Genesis which begins the story of the world's creation with exactly the same words.
This whole idea is known as the pre-existence of Christ and must have been pretty difficult for people to understand especially the Jews who thought of God as all powerful and omnipotent.
2. John then goes on to say that Jesus - the Word - was with God. In simple language this means that God has no secrets from Jesus and that the two have always known each other intimately. So if you want to know God, the best person in the entire universe to help you - is Jesus. Only he can reveal to us what God is like and how he feels towards us. This must have been a real eye-opener to those who thought of God as always stern and avenging. If Jesus the Word was always with God then God was always like Jesus. It's like opening a window in time through which we can see the eternal and unchanging love of God.
3. Finally John says that Jesus, the Word, was God. The meaning here lies partly in the fact that John was writing in Greek. When you use a noun in Greek you always have to define it. Otherwise the noun becomes more like an adjective and this, in the case of a person would describe the character and quality of that person. In John's writing he did not define the noun God so the meaning was not that Jesus and God were identical but that Jesus is so perfectly the same as God in mind and heart that in Jesus we can see perfectly what God is like. The author of Hebrews expresses it like this in Chapter1 vs3: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word."
So in the first two verses John lays it down very firmly that God has always been a God of love and is revealed perfectly in Jesus.
Now verse 3:-
Vs 3 - "And with this Word, God created all things. Nothing was made without the Word. Everything that was created received its life from him." (CEV)
You may be wondering why it is that John felt it so important to place such emphasis on the creation and why he connected Jesus with it in the early verses of the Gospel. In the November 2008 Parish News, the "Read the New Testament in a Year" notes for the letters of James, Peter and John included an explanation about a heresy called Gnosticism which plagued the early church. It was an intellectual and philosophical approach to Christianity which was way off the mark. It was troubled by the existence of sin and evil in the world and they worked out a theory to explain it. Basically they said that everything in the world had always been evil and that the true God could not have anything to do with it. They said that the "creator God" was an evil God and utterly divorced from the real God. Further, they identified the evil creator God as the God in the Old Testament who was quite different from, completely ignorant of, and hostile to the God who was the Father of Jesus Christ.
It was to counter these extraordinary beliefs that John and other New Testament writers - laid down two basic Christian truths:
1. We believe that there is only one God and that he did not have to work with alien and evil matter when he created the world. He created the world from nothing as it were, and there were no flaws in it.
2. We believe that this is God's world. He has never been detached from it and has always loved it, has always controlled it. The sins of humans have tarred the brush at times but now we know that Jesus was God's co-worker when it was first created we can understand that through his redemption God is seeking to win back that which was always his.
Vs 4 "In him was life, and that life was the light of men."
I'm offering no prizes for guessing what the two key words are here. In a sense these first verses of John are like the index at the beginning of a book. They state what the content of the book is and in John's case, life and light are the two basic great words on which the whole gospel is built
They are the two main themes which John develops and expounds on. In the gospel the word life is used 35 times and to live or to have life a further 15 times! The verse says "In him was life" - in other words "In Jesus was life". How many times do we hear Jesus himself say the word life?
"I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly" "I am the truth the way and the life"
"He who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life"
There are four things I would like to say about life.
1. Simply put, the life that Jesus offers is the opposite of destruction and death. Jesus gives us security in this life and in the life to come. He promises us that we will not perish. In a way, until we accept Jesus we have not really lived at all. A person who lives a Christ-less life exists but they do not know what life really is. Jesus is the only person who can make life worth living and guarantee a still fuller life.
2. John's gospel makes it very clear that behind it all is God the Father and that it is he who is the source and giver of real life. It is his wish that all people will have life. The Bible uses the term the living God repeatedly and it is as if God is saying "I created men that they should have real life; through their sin they have ceased to live and they only exist; I have sent them my Son to enable them to know what real life is." That was a quote from William Barclay.
3. So what is this life? What is eternal life? Does it just mean that life will go on for ever? I suspect that many people would not want life as we know it on earth to go on for too long anyway. No, real life is God's life it's not the duration that counts but the quality. What Jesus offers is eternal life an invitation for us to enter into the very life of God himself.
4. So how do we get this eternal life? John makes it very clear we must believe. He actually uses the word believe no fewer than 70 times in the gospel. I quoted Jesus before when he said "He who believes has everlasting life". Are there any terms and conditions to this? How deep does our belief have to be? There are two conditions which John makes clear;
(a) We must be absolutely convinced that Jesus is really and truly the Son of God. We must follow all he did and said, and there must be no doubt in our minds and hearts that he is who he says he is.
(b) We must unreservedly believe that what Jesus said is true and accept his commandments as absolutely binding. We need conviction of the mind, trust of the heart, and unshakable assurance to take Jesus at his word.
Now let's look at the other key word - light. This word occurs a total of 21 times and is the other prime message in John's gospel.
One of our greatest fears during our lifetime is fear of the dark. If we can't see about us we become afraid of what might or might not be there and our imagination plays havoc with our common sense. We panic or freeze. Until we know Jesus, life is a bit like that and we have nameless, instinctive dreads about the unknown and the things we can't see. But when we know Jesus, he brings light to our darkness and we can be trusting and focussed because we can now see where we are and where we're going.
Satan likes the dark and uses it to fuel our fears and lead us into wrongdoing and chaos in our lives. The light that Jesus brings however shows up all the sin in its stark truth and reveals where we had been going wrong. Jesus and his light reveals us to ourselves and points the way to God. One of the commonest questions Jesus was asked was "What am I to do?" Jesus always answered them in the clearest, simplest way. He shone his light on the problem.
So the light is comforting, revealing and guiding. It's no accident we light the Christ Candle every Sunday.
We come to the last verse of John's index for his book - verse 5.
Vs 5 "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it"
Darkness is another key word in John's message he uses it seven times in the gospel. To him darkness in the world was as real as light and had to be understood. As I indicated when talking about light, darkness is hostile to light they were one of the opposites that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus considered to be basic yet inter-related in the universe. Other major religions of the time also believed that the two great opposing powers in the universe were the God of light and the God of dark and that the main thing for humans was which of the two they chose. But consider this:- If there is a light shining in the dark, no amount of darkness can extinguish it. John's point here is: Jesus is that light in the darkness and will not be extinguished. The darkness does not like it but its there for us so make the choice. The wrongdoers like the dark because they have something to hide but it is impossible to hide anything from God.
John uses the idea of darkness several times in a symbolic way and in the stories he quotes it could be understood to mean ignorance and fear. e.g. in chapter six he tells the story of Jesus walking on the water. The disciples had left without Jesus and were out in the boat, the storm got up and they were terrified. Verse 17 says "By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them". Another way of putting that could be "They were without Jesus so there was no light in the dark".
Another example is in chapter 20. It was the day after the crucifixion when Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. She expected to find Jesus dead so it's no surprise that verse I says she went to the tomb "while it was still dark".
To John any Christ-less life was life in the dark. The darkness stands for life without Christ, and especially for life which has turned its back on Christ.
The last part of the verse reads "the darkness has not understood it". In conclusion I would like to give you two thoughts about what this could mean.
1. The darkness is opposite to the light and simply cannot understand the demands of Jesus. To the dark the light is a complete opposite but for us humans the light is a life-line. Think back to when we were talking about eternal life and the need to believe unreservedly in Jesus. We will never fully understand until we first submit our pride and our lives to him.
2. It could mean that the darkness has done all it could to extinguish the flame of Jesus but has failed and given up. But that doesn't mean that the light is not still burning. Think of all the atrocities the authorities performed on Jesus but did they extinguish the light? Absolutely not! John's wonderful gospel is positive testament that Jesus lives and is truly the life and light of the world.
He confirms the purpose of his writings in chapter 20, verse 31:
"But this is written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."