the master whom John the elder always described as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.
The Precious Gospel
The more we know about the Fourth Gospel, the more precious it becomes. For seventy years, John had thought of Jesus. Day by day, the Holy Spirit had opened out to him the meaning of what Jesus said. So when John was near the century of life and his days were numbered, he and his friends sat down to remember. John the elder held the pen to write for his master, John the apostle; and the last of the apostles set down not only what he had heard Jesus say but also what he now knew Jesus had meant. He remembered how Jesus had said: ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’ (John 16:12–13). There were many things which seventy years ago he had not understood; there were many things which in these seventy years the Spirit of truth had revealed to him. These things John set down even as the eternal glory was dawning upon him. When we read this gospel, let us remember that we are reading the gospel which of all the gospels is most the work of the Holy Spirit, speaking to us of the things which Jesus meant, speaking through the mind and memory of John the apostle and by the pen of John the elder. Behind this gospel is the whole church at Ephesus, the whole company of the saints, the last of the apostles, the Holy Spirit and the risen Christ himself.
JOHN
THE WORD
John 1:1–18
When the world had its beginning, the Word was already there; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. This Word was in the beginning with God. He was the agent through whom all things were made; and there is not a single thing which exists in this world which came into being without him. In him was life and the life was the light of men; and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not put it out. There emerged a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness, in order to bear witness to the light, that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; his function was to bear witness to the light. He was the real light, who, in his coming into the world, gives light to every man. He was in the world, and, although the world came into being through him, the world did not recognize him. It was into his own home that he came, and his own people did not welcome him. To all those who did receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God. These were born not of blood, nor of any human impulse, nor of any man’s will, but their birth was of God. So the Word of God became a person, and took up his abode in our being, full of grace and truth; and we looked with our own eyes upon his glory, glory like the glory which an only son receives from a father. John was his witness and his statement still sounds out: ‘This is he of whom I said to you, he who comes after me has been advanced before me, because he was before me.’ On his fullness we all of us have drawn, and from him we have received grace upon grace, for it was the law which was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is the unique one, he who is God, he who is in the bosom of the Father, who has told us all about God.
WE shall go on to study this passage in short sections and in detail; but, before we do so, we must try to understand what John was seeking to say when he described Jesus as the Word.
THE WORD BECAME FLESH
THE first chapter of the Fourth Gospel is one of the greatest adventures of religious thought ever achieved.
It was not long before the Christian Church was confronted with a very basic problem. It had begun in Judaism. In the beginning, all its members had been Jews. By human descent Jesus was a Jew; and, to all intents and purposes, except for brief visits to the districts of Tyre and Sidon, and to the Decapolis, he was never outside Palestine. Christianity began among the Jews; and therefore inevitably it spoke in the Jewish language and used Jewish categories of thought.
But although it was cradled in Judaism it very soon went out into the wider world. Within thirty years of Jesus’ death it had travelled all over Asia Minor and Greece and had arrived in Rome. By AD 60 there must have been 100,000 Greeks in the Church for every Jew who was a Christian. Jewish ideas were completely strange to the Greeks. To take but one outstanding example, the Greeks had never heard of the Messiah. The very centre of Jewish expectation, the coming of the Messiah, was an idea that was quite alien to the Greeks. The very category in which the Jewish Christians conceived and presented Jesus meant nothing to them. Here then was the problem – how was Christianity to be presented to the Greek world?
William Lecky, the nineteenth-century historian, once said that the progress and spread of any idea depends not only on its strength and force but on the predisposition to receive it of the age to which that idea is presented. The task of the Christian Church was to create in the Greek world a predisposition to receive the Christian message. As E. J. Goodspeed put it, the question was: ‘Must a Greek who was interested in Christianity be routed through Jewish Messianic ideas and through Jewish ways of thinking, or could some new approach be found which would speak out of his background to his mind and heart?’ The problem was how to present Christianity in such a way that it would be understandable to Greeks.
Round about the year AD 100, there was a man in Ephesus who was fascinated by that problem. His name was John. He lived in a Greek city. He dealt with Greeks to whom Jewish ideas were strange and unintelligible and even uncouth. How could he find a way to present Christianity to these Greeks in a way that they would welcome and understand? Suddenly the solution flashed upon him. In both Greek and Jewish thought, there existed the conception of the word. Here was something which could be worked out to meet the double world of Greek and Jew. Here was something which belonged to the heritage of both races and that both could understand.
Let us then begin by looking at the two backgrounds of the conception of the word.
The Jewish Background
In the Jewish background, four strands contributed something to the idea of the word.
(1) To Jews, a word was far more than a mere sound; it was something which had an independent existence and which actually did things. As Professor John Paterson, in his book The Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets, has put it: ‘The spoken word to the Hebrew was fearfully alive . . . It was a unit of energy charged with power. It flies like a bullet to its billet.’ For that very reason, the Hebrew language was sparing of words. Hebrew speech has fewer than 10,000; Greek speech has 200,000.
One poet tells how a certain man who had performed a heroic act found it impossible to tell it to his fellow tribesmen for lack of words – whereupon there arose another ‘afflicted with the necessary magic of words’, and he told the story in terms so vivid and so moving that ‘the words became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of his hearers’. The words of the poet became a power. History has many an example of that kind of thing.
When John Knox preached in the days of the Reformation in Scotland, it was said that the voice of that one man put more courage into the hearts of his hearers than 10,000 trumpets braying in their ears. His words did things to people. In the days of the French Revolution, Rouget de Lisle wrote the ‘Marseillaise’, and that song sent men marching to revolution. The words did things. In the days of the Second World War, when Britain was bereft alike of allies and of weapons, the words of the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, as he broadcast to the nation, did things to people.
It was even more so in the middle east, and still is. To the people of this region, a word is not merely a sound; it is a power which does things. Once when the biblical scholar Sir George Adam Smith was travelling in the desert, a group of Muslims gave his party the customary greeting:
