The Word, Made Flesh

John 1:1-18; Luke 2:22-40

On the Sunday after Christmas, the Revised Common Lectionary follows the lectionary of the Roman Catholic Church (which observes this day as a “Feast of the Holy Family”) and provides readings focussing on the child Jesus and his parents—this year, the presentation in the Temple. The Episcopal Church instead maintains a pattern established in 1979, of reading the Prologue from John 1. This had (also) been the gospel for Christmas Day, and its repetition here perhaps reflects the fall-off of Christmas morning attendance in the USA since the mid-twentieth century, when Christmas Eve or midnight services became the definitive way for most to attend Church for this feast.

Although its poetic features (interrupted by the more concrete references to John the Baptist) have led some to suggest an independent origin, the Prologue seems too deeply resonant with the themes of the Gospel as a whole not to be from “John,” however we understand that figure.

The Prologue can be read both in relation to the more concrete nativity stories of the Synoptics, but also as a digest of the Fourth Gospel as a whole. The sense of taking the story back in time is real; unlike Mark, but like the synoptics, John provides reflections on who Jesus was before the events of his ministry. The timeframe however is much longer still; “in the beginning” even suggests a re-writing or at least reinterpretation of Genesis itself.

The “Word” was in the beginning with God, John says. This term logos will have sounded to ancient readers like current ideas about the divine reason (logos means reason, as well as “word”) underlying the whole cosmos, but “word” language also had more specific Christian usages. For comparison, Mark’s use of “gospel” at the beginning of his work has to be read in the light of the other and presumably earlier use of the term in Paul’s writings, so not meaning Jesus’ biography but the news of salvation - “the” gospel. In Mark, to encounter Jesus is to encounter the Gospel. “The word” in the Synoptics and Acts means just the same thing, not just an idea or discourse but an encounter. It is not so surprising then to find also in John the identification of the message and the person, here in the more explicit proclamation that “the Word became flesh.”

Of course there are those who balk at the identification of the man Jesus as the message, preferring ideas to people, or at least wondering why good news has to be so grounded in this one person. Then there are those who seize on or exalt his name, weaponizing “Jesus” but no longer seeming to remember what the name and its bearer exemplify of truth and love.

Grabow Altarpiece, 1379-83; Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Just as challenging to our understanding or imagination though is how this relates to time. When is this “story” of the Word taking place? John’s Gospel is unique not just or not so much by starting earlier in time, but by starting the story in heaven rather than on earth, or in the life of God rather than in human history. While the incarnation takes place at a particular point in time, trinitarian theology requires that the incarnation refers to something that has always been true; eternity, after all, is not just a longer time than we can conceive of, but outside of time itself.

So although it might be tempting to read the Prologue —especially in the Christmas season— as an account of events before those recounted in the Gospel, a sort of abstract nativity, the opening of John is less a prequel than a sort of condensed version of the whole Gospel—meaning not just the whole of John’s narrative, but the whole of God’s story with us.

These few verses quite clearly refer to Jesus’ work and people’s response to it (see v. 10 “he was in the world” and 13 “to those who received him”), even before the striking proclamation that “the Word became flesh” (v.14). Eastern Orthodox theologian John Behr suggests that what John has in mind in the Word’s “becoming flesh” is not primarily Jesus’ human conception and birth, but the whole of Jesus’ life and particularly his Passion—his death and resurrection.¹ His cry “it is finished” is the culmination of the incarnation; only then has he truly become flesh. These events, not (just) those of Bethlehem, present Jesus’ real humanity and divinity.

The significance of Christmas season is not really grasped by aligning the celebration of incarnation with the universality of human birth or the importance of family life. The saving grace of the “Holy Family” feast may be that the accompanying stories are all so wildly subversive, not just of cliches about comfort and joy but of the conventional and respectable. The Presentation story has the aging prophetic pair Simeon and Anna—failures at family, but heroes of faith— hailing Jesus as his people’s redemption in the Temple, where redemption came day by day at a specific and difficult price. Simeon’s foreboding prophecy about Mary’s sorrow would have us understand that Jesus’ own act of salvation, forged in his confrontation of death, is already being foreshadowed.

The Prologue of John tells not the story of a divine being who will at some point come to earth, but the story of divinity itself. The man Jesus is the one who from the beginning is with God, and is God, and in whose life we have been caught up long before his Passion met ours. We are meant to see him differently as a result, but to see ourselves differently as well; for we are the ones “who received him, who believed in his name” and who thus become different, children of God in a new sense.

Understanding this extraordinary shift in considering both Jesus and ourselves helps us grasp the paradox that continues in John’s distinctive narrative of Jesus. This Jesus is at once, as Adolf von Harnack put it, “more human and yet more divine.”² This story is not just about Jesus either, but about us; as Athanasius of Alexandria put it, doubtless thinking of John’s Gospel too, “he became human that we might become divine” (On the Incarnation 54).

1. John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019.

2. Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3rd edition, Freiburg: JCB Mohr, 1893; Vol 1. p. 93