Sermons

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The Beginning
October 24, 1999
First in a series on the Gospel of John
Pastor Dan Baumgartner     
John 1:1-18 

I. Introduction to Studying the Gospel of John

This morning I want to issue you an invitation to begin a journey, a journey through the Gospel of John. With a couple of breaks, particularly around Advent, we will stay in John as a text for our sermons for some time. As the leaves finish turning color and fall, we will gather to read John. When the days get shorter (and wetter), we will listen to John. And when buds begin to appear on trees and we journey through Lent and into Easter…I suspect that we will still be listening to John.

I’m very excited to issue you this invitation. And I want to encourage you to read from this book as we go through it, read it from start to finish. Pray over it, talk about it, listen for God’s voice in it, study it, read about it. I’m excited because I think God has some special things in this book just for our community. 

And I’m excited because John is…different. The New Testament has four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The first three are called the “synoptic” gospels because of their similar scope and content. Most scholars, in fact, believe that Matthew, Mark and Luke had access to each other, or at least to a common source…though certainly they have very distinctive differences as well. In ancient times, the gospel writers were pictured with symbols:

• Matthew was represented by a lion. It presents the royal profile of Jesus, looking at his head and providing doctrine for followers. Some call Matthew the gospel for teachers. 
• Mark was pictured as a man, and his book looks hard at the humanity of Christ, and his saving presence in human history. Some call it the gospel for evangelists.
• Luke was pictured as an ox. His book emphasizes the work, the hands of Jesus, his ministry and care for people. Some call it the gospel for social-workers.
• But John. John is represented by an eagle, a soaring eagle, and looks at Jesus from above, exploring his connection to God, delving into the mysteries of his identity. Some call John the gospel for elders or spiritual leaders. 

John is…different. From earliest times, this gospel was clearly seen as distinctive and unique. Clement of Alexandria, in the second century, wrote this: “Last of all John, perceiving that the bodily facts had been made plain in the (other) gospels, being urged by his friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual gospel.” And so, I invite you...to see what God has for us in the months ahead.

II. Sermon on John 1:1-18

My grandfather Charles passed away this last summer. We were sad to lose him.

He was a dear man, and had probably the best memory of our family history…a history that moved from Germany, migrating eventually to the wheatfields of Central Idaho, and spilling more recently into Western Washington. Fortunately, about a year before he died, my mom felt an urgency, and had the foresight to sit Grampa down in front of a tape recorder, and get him talking about the family history…people, dates, times, places, stories. And because she did that, we have this audible record of Grampa describing the important events in our family over the last 100 years or so. If Mom hadn’t felt the urgency to do that, the memories might have been lost forever.

Sometime toward the end of the first century, church tradition tells us, early Christians felt the same need. There was a white-haired, long-bearded old man, hunched over from years of fishing and walking, who shuffled around with a cane. His name was John, not John the Baptist but John the apostle of Jesus, and his time was drawing to a close. He was perhaps the last living close companion of Jesus. And there was an urgency for John to pass on what he had seen and felt and experienced in the presence of Jesus, called the Christ. John had had perhaps 60 years to reflect on and ponder his time with Jesus. And so, at the urging of those who were afraid of losing both him, and an eyewitness account of Jesus…John began to tell the story. Here is how it begins:

John 1:1-18

Maybe John isn’t a very good storyteller…because he gives it all away at the beginning. There are twenty chapters after this one…but all they will do is spell out what John tells us is true in these very first verses. And if John can get away with telling us the end of the story first…I want to do the same thing this morning. We have 18 verses to think about…but this is what I want you to take home:

If you want to know what God is like…look at Jesus.

John begins at…well, the beginning. It is no accident that “In the beginning was the Word…” bears remarkable similarity to what Cal read from Genesis: “In the beginning God created…” John takes us back to the very beginning. And just as the Genesis writer tells us simply that even before creation and time, God WAS…John tells us that the Word…WAS. The Word was WITH God. The Word WAS God.

Now hang with me for a moment. There are two worlds here that John instantly brings together in these opening verses. The first is the Old Testament world, the Hebrew world, and the Hebrew idea of “the Word of God.” It appears throughout the Old Testament. It conjures up the image that when God SPEAKS…things happen. The divine, heavenly voice of God speaks, and creates reality. The Word is an action. And so in Genesis, God SAID, “Let there be light” and there was light. Later, God SAID, “Let the dry ground appear,” and it was so. 

This is wonderfully illustrated for us in one of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books called “The Magician’s Nephew.” In these books, Jesus is represented by a powerful and mighty lion. And in this book, the Lion is shown in the process of creating:

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away…and hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself…It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it…The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; …and as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave…the higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley…and trees!…All this time the Lion’s song, and his stately prowl, to and fro, backwards and forwards, was going on.” 

The Word of God. The Word of God was given through the prophets, as when Isaiah speaks and God says, “My Word goes out from my mouth; it will not return to me empty.” It came through the Psalmist, “He sent forth his Word and healed them.” The Word of God. Not a sound, but a dynamic, eternal, creative expression of very God.

The second world John taps into is the Greek world. John’s gospel was written in Greek, of course, along with the rest of the New Testament, and in that language “Word” comes from the word “logos.” In Greek philosophy, “logos” had to do with the supreme principle of reason, or order, in the universe. It was the controlling power or force that kept the world from collapsing into chaos. The Stoic philosophers said, “the logos pervades all things.” The Gnostic philosophers saw the logos as the guiding, directing power of God.

What John does here…is bring these two worlds together… “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Everything was made through the word. The word brought life and light. So far, so good. But then John goes to an entirely new place. He says that the Word…came into the world in a Person. John moves from the creation of the world…to the Word’s entrance into the world, nimbly skipping over years and years and years of history…for the purpose of landing instantly at what for John is THE defining moment in all of human history…the very Word of God enters physically into a dark, dark world. A world so dark that people don’t even recognize the light. A world very much like our world.

I don’t think I have to convince you that our world can be very dark. But sometimes, I am still shocked. This week I told our Bethany staff meeting one of my favorite quotes from the theologian Karl Barth: “Good theology is done with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” Then I broke them into small groups with the assignment to read this passage from John, and then look through the local papers for ways that this scripture was reflected, or ways it would speak to the events of the day. I happened to get Section B of the P-I, “Seattle and Northwest News.” It was 4 pages long. Here were some of the stories:

• Wealthy Federal Way community wants to hire exclusive, extra police to control crime in their community.
• The sentencing of the transsexual person who danced topless and breathed fire from a 180-foot tower next to the freeway in September.
• Two young girls fondled at a Halloween Haunted House.
• A follow-up story on a child-sex ring in Eastern Washington.
• A local 20-year old who murdered his girlfriend, then committed suicide.
• A Snohomish man being hunted after a kidnapping and murder in a drug dispute.

Four pages. So dark. And John says, “into this world…the Word of God came…in a Person.” Knowing already that many would not see or hear or understand, that they would reject Him. “The Word became flesh…” in someone called Jesus. This is what John had the audacity to claim. 

St. Augustine, writing in the 4th century in his famous Confessions, says that he read many of the Greek philosophers, beginning with Plato. And in these writings he read bits and pieces of ideas about the Word, some part of God involved in the creation. He says that in the philosophers he saw something of the imagery of the light of God and the darkness of the world. But, says Augustine, “That the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that he came to his own and was not received, that he gave power to become sons of God to as many as believed…These things I do not read (in the philosophers).”

That the Word would come in a living, breathing person, Jesus Christ…this was unheard of. No one sees God…not face to face. Not even Moses, who heard God, who spoke with God, who saw the Shekinah glory in the tent of God, a pillar of file…even he didn’t see God. But suddenly, here, in a life on earth, God fully reveals himself. And so John says, If you want to know what God is like…look at Jesus. 

That presents some problems for us. It is hard to understand. This is perhaps the key passage behind the foundational Christian belief in Jesus Christ as “fully human, fully God,” as our Confessions put it. And throughout the history of the church, Christians have struggled with this issue of the identity of Jesus. How can “fully God” and “fully human” be in one person? How can one Person be THE Light, be THE Word, have authority over who becomes a child of God? How can a spiritual being eat, walk and breathe on earth? How can one Person show us God? And so throughout history, people have swayed one way or another.

On one side, they have portrayed Jesus as fully and merely human…as somehow leaving behind all the attributes of being God’s divine Word, and becoming merely human. Yet that flies in the face of this passage, it contradicts Jesus’ miracles, his ministry of healing, his impact on the world, his willingness to die on a cross. If Jesus were ONLY human we throw out large parts of the Bible, and we find ourselves asked to turn our lives over to a man. A good man, but just a man. I am unwilling to do that.

Then others have gone to the other end of the spectrum. They say Jesus was fully God…but not really human. Perhaps he just “appeared to be human,” but it was just a deception, just smoke and mirrors. He didn’t actually feel hunger, or loneliness, or pain because he was God. But here again, to believe this we would throw out large portions of scripture including, “The Word became Flesh,” and the things Jesus said about Himself, and the stories of Jesus’ compassion and love and fear and physical agony are illusions. And we would find ourselves asked to attach ourselves to a deceptive God, a God who does not really KNOW life and death as we experience it, a God who at the end of the day can only say, “I feel your pain,” but has not experienced it or assumed it or transformed it. I am unwilling to go there as well.

We believe in Jesus Christ, fully human and fully God. God’s self-revelation.

If you want to know what God is like…look at Jesus. “And the word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us….” OR “came to be with us,” OR “put his tent among us,” OR, as Eugene Peterson says “moved into the neighborhood.”

I want you to notice one word in verse 14. It’s “US.” Up to this point, John has written 13 of the most profound verses in history, yet has talked only about “The Word, God, the world.” Profound as it is, there is a certain distance, a certain abstraction. But in verse 14, he slams all of it right into our lives when he says he “made his dwelling among US.”  Among John, among John’s people…moved into the neighborhood.

I don’t know exactly what your neighborhood is like. Maybe when I told you those newspaper stories, they didn’t seem too real for your world, your neighborhood. Maybe they sounded like media bites. But our neighborhood is just that dark. As a pastor, I talk with a lot of people in one week’s time. In the last week, in THIS community here, I have talked with people:

• who have been terribly let down and wounded by people they thought were faithful friends.
• people who have lived on the street for years, rain and shine.
• people who have lost people they love, and are numb or cracked or angry.
• people on drugs, some legal and some illegal, both struggling to find ways to cope with a complex world.
• people who are sick and literally unable to think clearly.
• people crying out for friends.

That IS our neighborhood…and it can be very, very dark. But the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us. Jesus does not just observe our world…he has been in the midst of it. He knows it. He knows us. He came here. He came solely out of love.

A number of years ago, California was in the middle of a long drought.  Years before, the riverbed which lies beneath the Los Angeles River had been paved to provide a smooth concrete channel. But the drought had dried the river up. Then one day the rains finally came…and came, and came. And that dry river bed became a surging wall of water. There was a young boy in that river bed, riding his bike as he had for months and months. He was swept away by the muddy, churning current as it smashed by. Somebody spotted him, struggling in the water, and called 911. Rescuers were sent to try to save him. Television crews picked up the story, and people watched on TV in horror as the boy was swept from one buttress to another, unable to hold on. Fire crews with ladders, and helicopters tried to get to him, tried to reach the boy, but he was moving down the river so fast they couldn’t get him. Two friends were watching their television as the boy was swept along, watching so many trying in vain to save him—from above, from the side. Suddenly one of the friends watching TV cried out in anguish, “My God, why doesn’t somebody get in the water?”  It was exactly the right answer. It was the only way…if someone would take the risk, brave the swift current, grab the boy and wrap him into strong arms, and pull him to safety.

The Word became flesh…and moved into the neighborhood. In Jesus Christ, God jumped headfirst into the dark, dark river, with no life preserver, no lifeline and no back-up plan…for your sake, and for mine. We have never seen such love as that.

John’s message for us this morning. Do you want to know what God is like?…then look at Jesus. Look at Jesus. Amen.