"In the beginning was the Word." John's Gospel starts in this way, echoing the start of the Old Testament. But while Genesis launches straight into the story of what God did, John's Gospel looks at things from a different angle. There is still activity: "all things were made" by the Word, but John's first concern is to tell his listeners about this Word: about who or what he, she or it was.
There have been long books written to explain John's opening phrase. When the Psalmist tells us: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of God's mouth," is this a simple statement of something God did, or did this 'word' (and this 'breath') have some sort of independent existence? When the Old Testament talks of God 'sending out' the Word, how far was this Word a separate being?
For John's Jewish listeners who knew a little Greek, the question was even more complicated. Jewish writers, in particular Philo of Alexandria, had worked hard to show how Jewish beliefs could be expressed in Greek philosophical language. For many Jews, the Word represented a bridge between the underlying order of the universe (its 'logic') and the matter which we can see and touch in the world around us.
Jews from all backgrounds would have understood John's description of the Word, through whom all things were made, in whom was Light, light shining in the darkness. But then John drops a bombshell.
"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." How could a disembodied power of God, how could a philosophical concept ever be made flesh? Camels, mice and pigs are flesh, and although human beings are flesh too, surely that is the upward limit - surely nothing as pure as the Word of God could become flesh?
John softens the blow. Jesus appears by the Jordan, fully grown and clearly a person of authority. But Matthew and Luke's accounts remind us that the process of 'becoming flesh' is not quite as glorious as John suggests. The baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and cradled in a manger, the baby for whom there was 'no room in the inn', how could this be the Word of God?
And how could God's Word, God's power and God's wisdom, be revealed in a baby whose ability to communicate lay only in tears and smiles, whose vocabulary would at first not extend beyond "Ga ga ga"?
Yet John's Gospel says that "we beheld his glory". The shepherds listening to the angels had a glimpse of that glory. The sages who had seen the star brought gifts that reflected that glory. And somewhere in all the paraphernalia of December, with its crowded shops, its cards from people we have not spoken to for years, its bearded men in red coats, its trees and its tinsel, there is a magic spark which gives us too an insight into the glory of it all.
Too often we read the Gospels without a feeling for this magic spark. For beside the glory is the tragedy, of a Saviour rejected by his people, arguing with the Pharisees, finally hounded to death by crucifixion. In Matthew's Gospel, the seeds are already there in Herod's jealous interrogation of the magi and his murder of the innocent children. But for John, the glory is there even at the lowest possible point, for his cry of "It is finished" is a cry of triumph - not of despair.
May Christmas for you be a time of wonder at God's glory, not hidden in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, but revealed in a baby, weak yet strong, helpless yet one who, in time, the winds and the sea will obey! And may that glory bring you joy, the joy that God is with us, not just at Christmas, but throughout the year.
HD