In the Beginning
In the Beginning……… John 1:1-18
Here we are on the first Sunday of the year AD 2026. And I thought this was as good a day as any to start at the beginning. Perhaps you find it strange to find that our gospel lesson speaks about a beginning that is as far away from the birth in Bethlehem as you could get at that time. But it is important to remember that the prophecies about the birth of Jesus came hundreds of years before that birth and that those prophecies were spoken to a people whose very existence as a nation was the result of their relationship to the God who called their ancestor Abraham and who was active not only among the nations before that time but indeed at the very beginning of creation.
Today we stand at the year 2026. As time goes, this marks the 2,026th year since the coming of God as a child in the manger at Bethlehem but even this is a relative marker of time. Calendars and the keeping of records about events have changed greatly over the course of history. The calendar that we regard as the standard today only was established in the 6th century when an Eastern Roman monk named Dionysius Exiguus determined that it had been 525 years since the birth of Christ. He was motivated to establish a new way of marking time to replace the then common Diocletian dating system which was based on the reign of an emperor known for persecuting Christians. Of course, this calendar was the standard in the Roman Empire and thus was widely used throughout the world. The acceptance of Christianity as the religion of the empire gave Dionysius the courage to even consider suggesting an alternative way of marking time. But it only became widely accepted when the Anglo-Saxon historian the Venerable Bede used it in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in AD 731. The practice of dating years before Christ as BC did not become common until the French Jesuit theologian Denis Pẻtau in the 17th century. Even then it has become accepted that Dionysius’s calculation was off by a few years and the birth was sometime between 6 and 4 BC.
So, time is truly relative and as we mark the years of our life, we need to recognize that the accuracy we attach to dates and times is truly a matter that is open to interpretation. But no matter how we mark the years or when we actually consider the birth of Christ to have happened, nothing changes the reality that it occurred and occurred in the life of this world.
And so John appears to take an approach to the coming of Christ into the world that is radical and doesn’t fit with the accounts of Matthew and Luke. John would not deny the actual birth of Christ in Bethlehem, nor would he not see Christ as the Messiah prophesied from long before but for John the presence of Jesus in the world was a sign that the very heart and spirit of God had come. The Word of God – the very creative breath of God – was in the world in human form. This was no mere angel visitation, no heavenly being with no ability to truly feel pain or suffering. This was the physical incarnation of God in the person of the Son – the one who had been born of Mary and the Holy Spirit. The events that brought Jesus into this world were not the result of some random divine intervention. The one who came in the form that people met as Jesus was indeed part of God from the beginning of time.
John’s experience of Jesus as a teacher and a healer led him to understand that Jesus not only spoke the divine imperatives that people needed to hear but that he was truly the Word of God. Genesis records that it was the spoken words of God that created all that came to be. Whatever this world was, it only took its shape when the words of God gave it life and purpose. The very existence of the world that we have been born into came about through the spoken word of the one we know as God. As John records – nothing that was created was created without him. But until the coming of God in Christ, there is no description of God that we could point to and say this is what God looks like. Before the coming of God in Jesus, people experienced the presence of God in fire, in cloud, and in stillness. They heard God’s voice calling to them in visions and dreams. They had conversations with God, and they felt the presence of God but to see the face of God was rare.
Drawing on his experience of Jesus and everything that Jesus revealed about himself, John concluded that the one who had walked on this earth was not just God in human form. This was the embodiment of the One who had creatively spoken at the beginning of time and had ushered into existence this world and all that is in it. He was the One who had given birth to this world, and he was the One who would give a new birth to this world.
In the first 5 verses, John reveals to us a mystery that defies our human logic and challenges us to recognize that God is more than we might ever have imagined. He is a being who is very much like us and yet beyond what we can ever be. He is the Parent and he is the Child. He is the very Word of God who not only spoke at the beginning of the world but has now spoken in the flesh and who will continue to speak through the Spirit given to those who by faith will follow in the ways of the One who came from the Father.
John knew that in Jesus he had truly met God – the God of creation, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the world. He had experienced the touch of God; he had felt the gaze of God; he had felt the love of God. And he knew in his heart and in his soul that this was the One who had the power to not only draw people back to God but to give them the right to be called children of God.
Through Jesus, the Word of God, John found a freedom that he never imagined he would experience. He knew that he and so many others had come to believe that they were unworthy of being accepted by God. John discovered that this Jesus was the only One who could secure true freedom from the sin that nothing they had known could take away. People longed to know that the God of their ancestors loved them and that there was a hope to never lose their relationship with the God who had created them and redeemed their ancestors so many times. The journey that John’s Gospel takes us on leads us to discover God’s gifts of mercy and forgiveness, healing, and release. And at the end in the passion of Christ, he reminds us that God’s creative Word and Spirit will never come to an end until that time when the final Word of God is spoken.
The resurrection became the first Word spoken by God as a sign pointing to the ultimate Word that will be spoken when the Lord returns. But for now, we have been given the gift of faith and the gift of God’s Spirit breathed into the faithful of this world that the will of God might be known and the gifts of the Spirit be shared and lived in this time and every time until the consummation of all things.
And 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. (John 1:14)
AMEN