Word Made Flesh

We now know what glory looks like

Commentary on John 1:1-18

Sarah Henrich

John 1:1–18 is the gospel reading for the Sunday before Christmas in 2025, where it is both elaboration and “teaser.” For the coming festival of Christmas, these verses offer a creation-size origin narrative that turns the tiny baby in a rustic crib into the creator of the universe. For the coming “year of John,” they provide threads to follow through the stories that come next, “teasers” that lead us deep into the gospel and deep into our human lives.

There are many excellent studies on the poetic way John 1:1–18 connects his gospel message about Jesus to Jewish Scriptures and to the non-Jewish world as well. The weaving of logos, life, beginning, tabernacle, and glory evokes the Genesis creation story (Genesis 1:1–2:4); the companionship of Wisdom in creation (Proverbs 8); the giving of the law at Sinai (Exodus 19:1–20:20; 24:3–18); the creation of the God-commanded beauty of the tabernacle (Exodus 25–30).

In the Narrative Lectionary, congregations have just heard that God’s effective word brings life out of death—new flesh and movement to old, moldering bones (see also Ezekiel 37, Advent 2)—and is not stoppable (see also Isaiah 55:10–11, Advent 3).

These would all be excellent foci for a preaching or teaching series.

For preaching right before Christmas, a couple of emphases may be more doable in a sermon and will also open up the gospel to our overstimulated human hearing. Not in any particular order, these are the following:

Visibility of glory

As John writes here (see also 14:9), the glory of God, God’s perceptible being, is visible in the human Jesus. Such proclamation reassures hearers that it is indeed God, whose covenantal promise to care for those God made a “little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8), who is truly present in Jesus. This is also a major claim in 1 John 1:1–4. “We saw” and “we witness” (verses 1, 2, 3). The enfleshment is to be trusted. We now know what glory looks like. What a challenge to our usual ideas! A glorious sunset, art, or music usually refers to something whose beauty somehow transports us beyond everyday reality. But Jesus, whose birth story is not told in John, is glory to be seen. “Come and see,” says Jesus, a young man hanging around in Galilee (1:39). “Come and see,” says Philip (1:47). Not so very glorious.

“You will see heaven opened,” says Jesus (1:51). Jesus is heaven opened among us—he bears God’s glory. It is hard to recognize it in a world that has defined glory to be about magnificence, grandeur, and the like. (Look up synonyms for “glory” and you’ll see!) We love beauty and mistake it for God’s glory. Can we train ourselves to see, to honor the glimpses we get of a glory that looks like truth and grace, like a call, like truly seeing God’s spirit indwelling even us as the Holy Spirit animates us? See Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:17–18 for a similar, amazing proclamation.

Witnessing

John the Baptizer “came for witnessing [martyrian] in order to witness [martyreo] about the light” (verse 7). John’s vocation as witness is so important that the line is repeated in verse 9. In 1:32 and 34, he twice states that he has fulfilled his calling. Given the shift in how the ancients understood glory, as well as how we do, there has to be a witness or testimony about who Jesus is and how we are to know. John’s whole gospel is a witness or testimony to who Jesus is (see 20:30; 21:24–25). The validity of a witness is a cause for concern (see John 8:13–18). One can only trust the testimony of an eyewitness, as in 1:34 and 19:35.

We are dependent on these witnesses for our own faith, for the stories that reveal the Word full of grace and truth in a world that often does not recognize or receive that truth (verses 10–11). Even our celebrations of Christmas look back to the witness of shepherds, angels, scholars, and kings—all signs that something wonderful has happened; that God’s own glory, God’s visible self is with us, as much human as we. The vocation for us is like John’s—to witness to what we have seen. And we do this together. We are able to recognize God’s Spirit moving among us as we share stories of our experiences with one another. We are able to recognize God’s Spirit when our witness leads us to speak truth to the world God loves even now.

There will be a cost

John’s words about darkness and not being received underline the vulnerability of love. But perhaps, at Christmas, it is enough to give the gift of Jesus as trustworthy witness to God’s love for God’s creation and our call to witness to that truth.

John’s good news for the world begins in a way to which we have become either too accustomed or too indifferent. Seldom do most of us dare to consider the dizzying universe in which we, simply, are. It is too vast, too intricate, too mysterious. But here is the gospel word: Among the most distant stars and planets, God recognizes and loves this one. God has filled this planet with life and light, with guidance and grace and truth. And we don’t have to guess at what this giving God looks like or cares about.

It is Jesus who has made God known (1:18b). So this gospel story is stunningly good news that redefines power as the power to love, as well as showing us that glory is vulnerability. Wheeling in through space—whatever that really is—we claim ourselves known and beloved by God’s own self, come in Christ. As the story moves forward, Jesus yearns for us to understand that all that power and glory and creative strength are on our side, and he longs for us to live in the light.

It is clear that we continue to be better able to light our world with electricity and explosions of all sorts, from the benign to the most malevolent, than we are at seeing the source and hope of all creation in such a humble Messiah. But the light is not overcome and never will be.