Commentary on John 1:[1-9], 10-18

The prologue of John’s Gospel cracks the lens with which we are tempted to engage in any too-small reading of the Gospel by directing our attention toward a cosmic space-time reality. Unlike the Lukan narrative that often shapes our imaginations in the Christmas season, the Second Sunday of Christmas plunges us into the deep time of the primordial Genesis creation narratives with John’s opening words: “In the beginning…”

Give yourself over to this reshaping of space-time reality. Help your congregation enter the cosmic realm of God’s dwelling, no longer confined by temporalities or geographies. A realm before there was a world. A time before chronology. A history before history. This is the beginning of the Good News, cosmic in scope and timeless in scale.

If the season of Christmas is a celebration of God-come-near, then John is preparing us for this enfleshing of the Divine in our midst by directing our gaze not to a manger or the holy family or the Christ child, but toward the cosmos, suffused with the light and life coming into the world, into time, into space, and into our lives.

The logic and wisdom of the Divine

“In the beginning was the Word…” (1:1). While “word” connotes language and communication to us, it holds those alongside other meanings in John’s usage. We might understand the Greek logos better if we experiment with its meaning a bit as something like the “logic of God” or the “rationale of God,” perhaps hearing these first verses suggest something like “the speech-act of God bringing the Divine logic to bear on the cosmos.”

The workings of Logos (Word) in John bear a striking and intentional resemblance to the workings of Sophia (Wisdom) in the literature of the Hebrew Bible. The two words also help us play with gender a bit, with the masculine Logos echoing the feminine Sophia.

Two texts expounding the presence of Sophia (Wisdom) with God sit alongside John’s Gospel as one option in this Sunday’s lectionary readings: Sirach 24:1–12 and Wisdom of Solomon 10:15–21. But the presence of Wisdom occurs elsewhere, in Proverbs, in ways that also parallel the Word in the Gospel of John:

• Proverbs 8:22 portrays the presence of Wisdom at the beginning of God’s work, God’s first act. In John, the Word was “in the beginning with God” (1:2).
• Proverbs 3:19 portrays God’s work through Wisdom in founding the earth. John says of the Word: “All things came into being through him” (1:3).
• Proverbs 8:27–30 portrays Wisdom working with God in the creation of the heavens and the deep, the skies and the seas, marking out the foundations of the earth. John: “Without him [the Word] not one thing came into being” (1:3).

While Wisdom is not expressly present in John’s text, readers/hearers familiar with the wisdom literature certainly would have heard its echoes. Catholic New Testament scholar Sister Mary Coloe argues, “That Wisdom is present but unnamed in the New Testament resonates with the experience of women in church communities today who are present and active, but their contribution and leadership [are] unrecognized and unnamed.”¹

We would do well to help our congregations recover this echo of Sophia in the Logos, as most are likely unfamiliar with the wisdom literature providing the Jewish background to John’s Gospel.

The light shines and the Word became flesh

Scholars debate when the incarnation is first portrayed in John’s prologue. Verse 14 is an obvious answer: when the Logos of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. But others see the incarnation appearing as early as verse 5: “The light shines in the darkness…”

We can engage this debate not as an either/or concern, but as an even more intriguing both/and possibility. What would it mean if we took 1:5 seriously as the inbreaking of God’s incarnate presence upon the cosmos, not in human flesh but in the cosmic order (logos) of creation? (“Light from light,” as the Nicene Creed says.) This may very well open our perspective—as the whole prologue of the Gospel seems intent on doing—to the indwelling of God in the other-than-human realm of the cosmic order.

Again, Genesis is evoked: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it” (John 1:5).

The cosmos revels in the light of God before there are humans to perceive it.

But then, the incarnation that we celebrate in the Christmas season: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” (1:14).

There is an interesting point in this passage that we may overlook due to the presumed gender of Jesus if we aren’t careful to attend to the evangelist’s words: The Word becomes flesh, not man. Margaret Daly-Denton says, “‘The word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. … ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity.’”² Or, as Mary Coloe says, “[Flesh] is all inclusive, male and female, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.”³

While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life. The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot imagine with our limited space-time perspective.

Grace upon grace

The good news of this text for humanity shines through in these expressions: the power to become children of God” (1:12), to receive grace upon grace from the fullness of the light of all people (1:16). And becoming children of God is a gift of grace cosmic in scope, timeless in scale.

Notes

1. Mary L. Coloe, John 1–10, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2021), 8.
2. Margaret Daly-Denton, John: An Earth Bible Commentary: Supposing Him to Be the Gardener (New York: T&T Clark, 2017), 35.
3. Coloe, John 1–10, 13.