1:1 - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
The good news with which the Fourth Gospel begins is that humans are neither first in the world nor alone in the world. The Word is first, and God has come to us."
Lamar Williamson, Jr., Preaching the Gospel of John (Louisville/ London: Westminster John Knox, 2004) 1; emphasis author's.
Much have been written about why John refers to Jesus as the Logos, "the Word." Much have also been written about how the expression should be translated and what it might mean against the various possible backgrounds from which John drew his inspiration for the expression, or for the different audiences who may read the Gospel.
If we are puzzled by what it means, re-reading the Gospel of John soon clarifies our puzzle, for if we have read the Gospel through at least once, it is almost impossible not to conclude that when John calls Jesus "the Word" he intends to say that, ultimately, Jesus is all that needs to be said. Jesus sums up all that really matters about life. Living in a digital age, perhaps another way of thinking John's thought is to think of "the password" instead. It is the one word that unlocks all that matters to us, the one word that stands between us and all the secrets and goodies on the hard-drive of life. Jesus is the sum of all that God wants to say to us, the sum of all that we ever need to know and, for those who have come to know and love him, the sum of all that we want to say.
Similarly, Michaels observes:
Above all, Jesus is introduced in the prologue as the Revealer, the one through whom God spoke in the beginning and through whom he continues to speak. Elsewhere in John's Gospel, Jesus speaks the word, but in the prologue he is the Word, the personal embodiment of all that he proclaims."1
This way of thinking about Jesus as the Word is also reflected in the thinking of the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, for he says (1:1-2):
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.
Jesus sharing eternity with God the Father is a central tenet of Jesus' teaching about himself, and John would not permit it to be asserted any less clearly. Thus, F. F. Bruce reminds us that:
. . . when the heaven and earth were created, there was the Word of God, already existing in the closest association with God and partaking of the essence of God. No matter how far back we may try to push our imagination, we can never reach a point at which we could say of the Divine Word, as Arius did, "There was once when he was not."2
A question that has intrigued scholars considerably is the cultural-intellectual background from which John might have plucked the expression 'the Word' as a designation of Jesus and, therefore, how the term is to be understood. This summary is provided here for your understanding. There is no conceivable wisdom in mentioning any of the following discussion in a sermon. Even if you should think an adult Bible class might benefit from it, keep it to a minimun—use your time with your flock for more useful matters.
While a number of proposals have been asserted, none can claim more than the certainty of probability. These proposals fall into two main categories; the Jewish and non-Jewish. D. A. Carson provides a useful summary of the non-Jewish possibilities:
The . . . term logos, was used so widely and in such different contexts in first-century Greek that many suggestins as to wht it might mean here have been put forward. The Stoics understood logos to be the rational principle by which everythin exists, and which is of the essence of the rational human soul. As far as they were concerned, there is no other god than logos, and all that exists has sprung from seminal logoi, seeds of this logos. Others have suggested a background in Gnosticism, a widespread ill-defined movement in the Mediterranean world of the first three centuries; but it must be admitted that, so far as our sources go, there is little evidence for the existence of a full-blown Gnosticism before John wrote his Gospel . . . Still others think that John has borrowed from Philo, a first-century Jew who was much influenced by Plato and his successors. Philo makes a distinction between the ideal world, which he calls 'the logos of God', and the real or phenomenal world which is but its copy. In particular, logos for Philo can refer to the ideal man, the primal man, from which all empirical human beings derive. But Philo's logos has no distinct personality, and does not itself
How useful then are these proposals for understanding what 'the Word' means in John? Carson, wisely, puts things in perspective:
The wealth of possible backgrounds to the term logos in John's Prologue suggests that the determining factor is not this or that background but the church's experience of Jesus Christ. This is not to say the background is irrelevant. It is to say, rather, that when Christians looked around for suitable categories to express what they had come to know of Jesus Christ, many that they applied to him necessarily enjoyed a plethora of antecedent association. The terms had to be semantically related to what the Christians wanted to say, or they could not have communicated with their own age. Nevertheless, many of the terms they chose, including this one, had semantic ranges so broad that they could shape the term by their own usage to make it convey, in the context of their own work, what they knew to be true of Jesus Christ . . . In that sense, as helpful as the background study may be, it cannot by itself determine exactly what John means by logos. For that information, while thinking through the background uses, we must above all listen to the Evangelist himself.4
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2013