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, curiously I think, 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. Yet The Episcopal Church maintains a pattern established in 1979, of reading the Prologue from John 1 instead. For Anglicans and the western Church generally, this had (also) been the definitive 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 American Christians to attend Church for this feast.

Although its poetic features (apparently interrupted by the more concrete references to John the Baptist) have led some to suggest it had 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, as we read it.

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 two synoptic nativity narratives, John provides reflections on who Jesus was before the events of his ministry recounted in the Gospels. The timeframe however is much longer still; “in the beginning” even suggests a re-writing or at least reinterpretation of Genesis itself. Yet it is a mistake to read the Prologue of John only as a sort of prequel.

The “Word” was in the beginning with God, John says. This term logos sounded to ancient readers like philosophical 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. A couple of weeks ago I noted that Mark’s use of “gospel” at the beginning of that work should be read in the light of the other, earlier meaning of the term found already in Paul’s writings, not Jesus’ biography but the news of salvation - “the” gospel. In Mark and otherwise, to encounter Jesus is to encounter the Gospel. “The word” in the Synoptics and Acts means just the same thing. It is not so surprising then to find in John, too, the identification of the message and the person, but here in the more explicit proclamation that “the Word became flesh.”

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

Just as testing to our understanding or imagination though is the timing of all this, or how it relates to time. To say that “the Word became flesh” is to play with our sense of time, if “the Word” is the whole message, and not just a name for an eternal being.

Grabow Altarpiece, 1379-83; Kunsthalle, Hamburg

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 perhaps better to say in the life of God rather than in human history. While the incarnation takes place at a particular point in human history, trinitarian theology requires that the incarnation refers to something that has always been true for God; 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 proper, read carefully the opening of John is less a prelude or prequel than a sort of condensed version of the whole—meaning not just the whole of John’s narrative, but the whole of God’s story with us.

In particular 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 then that what John has in mind in the Word’s “becoming flesh” is not solely or primarily Jesus’ human conception and birth, but the whole of Jesus’ life and particularly his Passion—his death and resurrection.¹ These events, not (just) those of Bethlehem, present Jesus’ real humanity and divinity. This, by the way, is also why can say that even Mark, without infancy or divine prehistory, is an incarnational Gospel.

Thus the significance of the Christmas season is only weakly grasped, if at all, by aligning the celebration of incarnation with the universality of birth or the importance of family. The saving grace of the “Holy Family” feast is that the accompanying stories are all so wildly subversive, not just for cliches about comfort and joy but of the conventional and respectable. The Presentation story for this Sunday has the aging prophetic pair Simeon and Anna hail Jesus as his people’s redemption, in the Temple, where redemption is known to come at a specific price. Simeon’s foreboding prophecy about Mary’s sorrow would lead all but the most obtuse to understand that Jesus’ own act of salvation, forged in his confrontation of death, is being foreshadowed here.

The Prologue of John introduces not the story of a divine being who will at some point come to earth, but the story of divinity itself. The man Jesus, whose story will be told, is the one who from the beginning is with God, and is God, and in whose life we have been caught up since 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. 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 is not just about Jesus either; 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).

Happy St John’s Day.

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