John 1:6-15

John 1:6-8     John the Witness – 1 

The author briefly interrupted the reflection to emphasise that the life, that was the light of humanity, was not to be associated directly with the ministry of another striking personality, John (the Baptist). In this Gospel, the significance of John was as a witness to testify about the light, so that through him people might be led to faith in the true light. (In the fourth Gospel, John’s baptismal ministry would be quite secondary to his role as witness.)

The author’s concern may have come from the life-situation of his community, and reflected discussion, or even disagreement, with disciples of John the Baptist.

John 1:9     The Word in Human History

The Beloved Disciple was not interested in metaphysical speculation. The Word was real in Jesus. The starting point of the whole reflection was precisely the challenge raised by the impact of the human Jesus on the author and on the Christian community to which he belonged.

The author developed the important movement, already hinted at in the mention of John’s witness, from light and its place in the scheme of creation to light in human salvation history. He was concerned with the responses made to the light. At the same time, the light became more clearly personal.

John 1:10-14     The Word in Salvation History

The author introduced the sad and perplexing theme of the world’s rejection of the light. He lamented the even more puzzling failure to accept the light by the majority of God’s chosen people, the Jews.

The reflection moved from rejection to the wonder of acceptance. To receive the light is equivalent to believing in the name of the yet unidentified, but clearly intended, Jesus. The wonder of acceptance moved beyond receiving being and life from God to being born from God and becoming children of God. In human understanding, to be born of another is to bear the nature of the other, to be of the same kind.

This birth is clearly the result of the action of God; it is beyond human agency. Drawing from his own experience, the author plainly ruled out natural human procreative capacity, intuitive desire or deliberate human planning or effort. Being children of God was not something flowing from the simple fact of being human; nor was it to be achieved by the desire for self-improvement or by human striving for self-transcendence. Everything was gift – sheer, unmerited gift of God. The new, indescribable experience of being born from God, the experience awaiting the disciple of Jesus, happens, and can only be received. Yet the act of reception is by no means passive. It involves the radically adventurous choice to believe in Jesus. 

Believing

“Believing” would figure prominently in the unfolding narrative, and would be a significant feature in the author's vocabulary. For the author, believing meant entrusting oneself to another. It was essentially a relational reality – a special kind of relationship. The author had in mind the relationship of love. To believe in another was to stand before the other in total vulnerability, to surrender all use of power, and to do so simply because one trusted the other. It meant opening to the unknown, to the possibility of personal change and growth.

“Believing” was also an act of hope. Believing in Jesus would make available “a power to become ...”. It would set free an unrecognised capacity and untapped energy that would enable believers to “become” what they were not yet. Believers in Jesus would become disciples (literally, learners). All loving relationships are learning experiences. They would learn the heart and mind of Jesus.

Such believing would always be struggle. Vulnerability does not come easily in a broken and untrusting world. Every individual seeks to cling to some level of control, to retain some element of power. To become disciples of Jesus, children of God, would prove to be radically counter-cultural. Indeed, it would be possible only to the extent that the Jesus whom they loved would “give them power to become...” 

The Word, already present in the world as medium of life and light to all, revealing the wonder of God through the beauty of creation and the message of the Hebrew prophets, became human. The Greek word, often translated as lived among, is rendered more colourfully as pitched his tent among. The Word entered into concrete human history and took on human limitations.

The author excitedly moved from comment to personal testimony. He spoke in the plural – his reflection expressing the experience of the Christian community to which he belonged. Yet he had still not explicitly identified the Word made flesh as Jesus. There was no need. The community knew well the subject of his meditation: we beheld his glory.

In scriptural language, glory refers to what is known of another, to what people are able to see. The Hebrew Scriptures spoke frequently of the love and truth of God. Though often translated in different ways, depending on the context, love is to be understood as graciousness, and implies, particularly, steadfast love and mercy. Truth implies personal integrity and consistency. It is often translated as “faithfulness”. Speaking of God, Psalm 117 expressed the meaning so beautifully, while translating the words differently:

For the Beloved Disciple, and for his community, resurrection had enabled a mystical experience of “Jesus as flesh”. Other human persons were able to share in the resurrection of Jesus – children of God, born from God. That was the community’s faith-enlightened experience. They saw resurrection as a heightened expression of creation, present from the beginning, but unrealized. In that sense, they had been able to say of the Word made-flesh in Jesus: Everything came into being through him, and nothing that came into being came into being without him. In him was life… [verses 3-4]”.

The community of disciples had been overwhelmed and overjoyed by what it had known of Jesus. They saw him as full of love and truth, of the love and truth, indeed, of his Father. The relationship of Word to God became the relationship of Son to Father – the Son’s glory reflecting and revealing the glory of the Father. 

Father and Son

Throughout the narrative, the author would be at pains to emphasise that Jesus revealed the unknowable mystery that was God. Jesus would never refer to himself as the Word; he would always speak of himself as Son. Why did Jesus use the terms Son and Father to speak of his unique relationship with God?

In the human mind, the concept of paternity has a number of aspects. In human experience, fathers are male; they exist years before they have sons; they are older. But, in reality, no man is a father until he has a son. Being father and being son happen simultaneously. While sons remain children, fathers have power, and a certain superiority. However, that superiority is not an essential superiority. A son's humanity is, in essence, the same humanity as his father's; he is no more human or any less so, than his father. To know a son's humanity is to know a father's humanity. What essentially differentiates one from the other is their relationship. The son originates from the father.

Terms used of God are to be understood analogically, not literally. God is more unlike than like any human father. The Father is not male; nor did he exist before the Son; nor is he greater than the Son – though God's divinity is infinitely greater than Jesus' humanity. Jesus obeys the Father in the sense that his will and his actions originate in the Father. Jesus is sent by the Father, in the sense that the Father is the point of origin.

Because people inevitably have their own sense of fatherhood derived from their experience of fathering or being fathered, it is natural to conclude from this experience that they know to some extent what God the Father is like. Their experience, however, has been only of human, and, therefore, imperfect and sinful fathers, who are all necessarily male. .

God, as Father, is unknowable other than as revealed by, and in, the human Jesus. Even then, Jesus' revelation of the Father is limited by his humanity. He is the human expression of the Father's divine reality. God the Father can be known only by knowing Jesus intimately (and, then, purely by analogy).

Jesus would see as an important part of his mission the re-defining of the fatherhood of God. 

Those who had received the light had experienced the power to become children of God, born … from God. Yet their filial bond to God was distinguished from that of only son of his Father: that relationship would remain always unique.

John 1:15     John the Witness – 2

The author returned briefly to clarify the witness of John, who testified not only to the pre-eminence of Jesus, but to Jesus’ pre-existence: he was prior to me.

Next >> John 1:16-18