Jesus: God’s glorious light become flesh

I love the gospel of John. Matthew talks about the fulfillment of prophecy, Mark is the action gospel, and Luke has a lot of details and an outsider’s perspective, but John uses philosophy and poetry to evoke the truth rather than just state the facts. Confession time: when I was in college, I was actually in a poetry club where we wrote and read poetry weekly. Poetry is really underrated as a vehicle for truth. In a world where truth is often interpreted as pure objective facts, it’s nice to see someone who uses art and beauty to communicate truth.

The first chapter of John has some nuances that aren’t immediately clear to modern readers. There was the concept of the Word—the Word was with God, and the Word was God. To the Greek readers John was writing for, they would have immediately recognized this as the Greek concept of Logos. Logos, from which we derive our English word logic, was essentially an underlying sense of logic and reason. If a piece of persuasive writing built a solid logical foundation and avoided various fallacies, it was said to use Logos.

Ancient Greece was the birthplace of Western philosophy, so discourse grounded in the Logos was a cornerstone of the modern philosophical movement. Greek readers would have known Logos as something that would bring light into the world. It was a concept that led society away from ignorance and toward enlightenment, and it was a relatively recent innovation, so it was easy to view the Logos as an intellectual savior. So imagine the impact of John’s words in verse 14: “The Logos became flesh and made his home among us.” John had taken an abstract concept that led to enlightenment and equated that to Jesus coming into the world. The Greeks had many gods, so rather than use the concept of another god to describe Jesus, John used the concept of truth and rationality itself.

Modern Christianity talks a lot about the personal nature of God, and it’s kind of lost on us how radical the idea of a knowable god was at the time. Forgetting what we know about God and thinking instead of getting to know the underlying sense of logic and rationality that is used to understand and describe the universe gets us pretty close to understanding how groundbreaking that idea was back then.

Having access not only to a personal savior but also an embodiment of the truth that permeates the universe gives some understanding of the many different things God can be to people who need him. There are times I need the personal God, and there are times I need the cosmic God, and our God is both.