These first 18 verses in John 1 form John’s prologue - the introduction to his story of good news that orients us to the essential background before we plunge into the story proper. We want to begin unpacking this dense (and dramatic) ending to the Prologue of John by asking 2 main questions:
What do we know about the Word?
What is flesh?
(A) Receiving the Son: Advent begins in the dark; first darkness, then light (John 1:14-15)
What do we know about the Word?
What do we know about the Word so far (v1-13)? What are the properties of this ‘Word’, and how is this continually emphasized throughout John’s Prologue (v15)?
The first 13 verses have taught us that the Word is eternal (John 1:1a) and is both distinct from and equal to God (John 1:1b). The Word is a co-Creator, not a created thing (John 1:3) and has life in Himself (John 1:4). The Word is also coming into the world (John 1:9-11).
This is where John’s gospel starts. Every other gospel begins with more of an emphasis on the humanity of Christ, but John’s gospel is bursting with His divinity.
We see this embedded in an aside (John 1:15), where John the apostle writes a mini note to us, in brackets, about John the Baptist. He wants us to know that John the Baptist cried out about the Word to make two points. First, he acknowledges that the Word “comes after me”. In all 4 gospels, the ministry of Christ begins after the ministry of John. But John the Baptist also wants the reader to know that while Christ came after him in time, Christ ranked before him because He was before him! John reminds everyone that we must not think of Jesus the Christ as his successor, or simply a prophet who came after John! He is superior and ranks before John.
Friends, as we read this, let us not treat this Word as just an ordinary human baby. What John the Baptist cries out here - desperate for you to not misunderstand - John the disciple writes out clearly in John 1:1 : in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. God was ‘arriving’. The word Advent itself means “arrival”, and thus when we speak of the first Advent, we are speaking of the first coming of Jesus. The Creator was coming to the world that He had created.
What would His arrival be like? How would He come? In visions or via a burning bush? Before we answer that, a second question sets the stage in full.
What is flesh?
What is flesh, and what does it mean for us that Christ took on flesh? It is helpful to note that flesh in Scripture can carry several meanings. Here, by ‘flesh’ we simply mean the way God made us — human, mortal. Sometimes, flesh can also mean our sinful nature (as Paul will write about in Romans when he wages war with his – flesh), but since this is what the Word put on, then it must be sin-free.
Let’s also trace the story of “flesh” in the Bible. We see in Gen 1:26-28 that flesh was created good and capable of bearing the image of its Creator. This is why the first humans could also be naked and un-ashamed (Gen 2:24-25), which is a poetic way of saying that they had absolutely no thing to hide at all, not one bit, such that when their flesh was revealed in full, they felt no shame at all. That’s not an experience that any of us have ever had, because once sin entered the world, we find those same humans now naked and very ashamed – they turn to hide from God’s presence (Gen 3). Romans 1 describes this fall from grace in the language of exchange - the story of sin is the story of how humans have swapped out the glory of God for what is dishonorable and shameful. Ever since Adam, those who are flesh – humans – have participated in the constant exchange of God’s glory for shame.
This is who we are.
“The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us..”
Now when we turn from that to read John 1:14a — “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” - there is quite a difference between reading this verse on a fridge magnet (and having your mental picture be a baby sleeping peacefully in a manger), and reading it as part of John’s Prologue, having considered the darkness and dysfunction of the world that the Word comes into.
The first thing that might strike us is the humility of the Creator. The Creator-God comes to us in a form that we can recognise and receive - the form of a creature. In John 1:3, we see that all things were made through Him. Yet though the Word is in the category of Maker / Creator, somehow, He crosses over to be a creature among other creatures to redeem creatures. He almost does this too well – Jesus is so thoroughly human that many in the gospels struggled to believe His claims.
And the humility of Christ is vast. Led by Philippians 2, we often head straight for the cross, where His humility is displayed in its full radiance. We often think about the humility of Christ in His crucifixion. But the season of Advent encourages us to ponder not just His dying, but His living. The Word became flesh and lived for thirty-three years on earth, among humans, and experienced life with them. He was vulnerable to their words, pleading with Him or accusing Him. To their actions – kneeling, grabbing the hem of His robe, chasing him to a cliff’s edge. An actual human person. So another name for the Word made flesh is Immanuel. God with us – as one of us. The incarnation of the Word in flesh both shows His merciful condescension as He comes to us, and in His life as one of us, how He dignifies every bit of human life and existence, from birth to death and beyond.
We must also consider what the Incarnation says about our human condition. He had to come in the flesh because flesh had gone so horribly wrong. That’s not something that we opt to think about at Christmas-time. That’s why Advent is a necessary season that teaches us to watch and wait and to be sober about all the ways that this world is broken. We don’t have to look very far — just look at the news. Our world right now is full of the sins that people commit and the ways that sin has filled the floor of our world with broken glass. Sickness and death have taken up residence here. This is the world that Christ dwelt in, and it is dark when Christ comes.
Advent invites us to be honest about our human condition. How are you doing, and what are you really like? Look around you. Where is it dark where you are? How is your neighbor in darkness? How is your community in darkness? Look inside the church too. How might your pastors be struggling even as they feel the pressure of delivering you a perfect Christmas Zoom service with smooth transitions between segments?
Advent also invites us to look inside and be honest about our own struggles. What sort of addictions are you caught in? What sort of sin do you feel uncomfortable confessing, what sort of sadness feels taboo because it is ‘the holidays’ or ‘Christmas-time’? What are all the ways in which you have been ‘de-humanized’ by the year, by the sins of yourself and of others? How might you desperately need that glorious image of God, which you have exchanged for dishonor and shame, to be restored?
Friends, if your Christmas happiness or festive mood only holds up because you have closed your eyes to the wreckage of the world, hear the words of today’s text. The gospel calls us to stare at the realities of the world, and to take them in. It is only then that our eyes can adjust to the genuine conditions around us, and be readied to watch & wait for the genuine hope and light of Christmas to break in and shine through the mess of it all. If the Word took on flesh and dwelt among us, then our full immersion in the human condition is really important.
The image of God: lost, and restored
Consider the lyrics of the Christmas hymn “O Holy Night”. Why is it such an enduring favorite? One reason is that we actually hear our real selves reflected in the song. Long lay the world (of flesh) in sin and error pining - till He appeared (in flesh) and the soul was suddenly reminded, awakened to its worth. The coming of Christ actually does something to our flesh.
The eternal Word of God had to come in the flesh because our flesh was always meant to represent and picture the Father's glory. That’s the intent from the beginning (Gen 1:26). What would that have been like? The Bible teacher and writer Michael Reeves uses this analogy:
“Adam was like a beautiful portrait painting. On him, the image of God was drawn. What happened at the Fall was that the portrait was utterly wrecked. Adam no longer looked anything like God. He'd become vicious, selfish, horribly unglorious. And so the painting was ruined. How could this precious portrait be restored? The problem was - there was nobody who knew what the portrait had once looked like. We seek to mend ourselves, but we don't know what “mended” looks like because to know it, you had to know God. You had to really know what He's like. Otherwise, you could never know what the image of God on human flesh should look like. There was only one hope. The original subject of the portrait had to come and have His likeness redrawn on the canvas of human flesh. Only the One whose likeness was originally drawn on Adam could restore and renew that lost portrait. And so, the image of God Himself came. He took on humanity to show us the image of God in the flesh. Our only hope of restoration to wholeness is in Christ, the image of God. Humanity can be mended nowhere else.”
The Incarnation of Christ is the start of us being re-humanized because that Word, Jesus Christ, is fully God without any kind of compromise, and fully Man. A key question at this point is: what does that ‘restored image’ look like?
Glory: full of grace and truth
John 1:14b tells us that God’s image re-drawn on humble human flesh looks like glory (John 1:14b). We have exchanged the glory of God for the shame and dishonor of worshipping and becoming like creatures, so God had to take on our creaturely condition and re-clothe it to reveal His glory which we had lost.
While God’s glory is an endless subject, John starts us here - it is full of and bursting and overflowing with two things: grace and truth. To make sense of those terms, we have help from commentators like D.A. Carson who observe that if the first portion of the prologue corresponds to Genesis – let there be light in darkness, and creation themes - then the second portion corresponds to Exodus. In other words, John 1:14 is picking up on and echoing an earlier episode in Exodus where God speaks with Moses and Moses requests to see God’s glory (c.f. Exo 33:18). God agrees and says that He will pass before him (c.f. Exo 33:19). In Exo 34:5-7 the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with Moses and proclaimed His name: the LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. In this exchange, we see that when Moses asked God to show His glory, God explains who He is and what His goodness entails by telling Moses that He is overflowing with steadfast love and faithfulness.
What the commentators help us see is that when John writes ‘grace and truth’ in the Greek, he is picking up those last 4 Hebrew words (“steadfast love and faithfulness”) such that “the glory revealed to Moses when the LORD passed in front of him and sounded His name was the very same glory John and his friends saw in the Word-made-flesh” (Carson). The way that God expressed His unique goodness in Exodus 33-34 is the same stuff that Jesus, the Word made flesh, is full of. What do these divine qualities of steadfast love and covenant faithfulness look like painted on human canvas? Christ answers all of these questions in His living and His dying. Living – in the faithful obedience of His life, lived in dwelling among sinners, without bending or breaking – without sin. And in His faithful dying because He walked, steadfast and without swerving, towards Calvary.
One last thought: why is ‘steadfast love’ translated into ‘grace’ when we step into John’s gospel? The answer is that the steadfast love and faithfulness of God is given to the unstable and the unfaithful - it is a gift of grace because the recipients of steadfast love do not deserve it. The love of God is given to the ‘world’ and the ‘flesh’ that have turned away from God. All the qualities that would exhaust love and reject love and spurn love and quench the flames of love and affection just do not put the love of God out. That is grace, as opposed to a love that is earned. That is steadfast, as opposed to a thin layer of sentiment that is easily punctured by betrayal.
So when John writes that he sees the Son’s glory, full of grace and truth, that is not just beautiful words on a coffee mug. He wants his readers to know: You can expect Jesus Christ to be not just relentlessly humble, but a relentlessly persistent redeemer. He will save His rebellious, runaway people from their sins. That’s what John has seen. That’s the story he is beginning to tell, right here in the opening verses of his gospel.
There is one problem that you may have noticed. I am not the one and only Son from the Father. Neither are you. I do not perfectly bear the steadfast love and faithfulness of God on my flesh. What then? The good news continues! Because while the grace and truth shown to sinners on the cross is reserved to the Son alone, the grace and truth that He embodied in his obedient life is for any image bearer who the Son has clothed with Himself. It is for every child of God, and this is what verses 16 to 17 will spell out.
(B) Receiving the Father: all of His gifts to us are found in His Son (John 1:16-18)
Those who see, receive
In John 1:14, John tells us that “we have all seen” - in John 1:16, those who see become those who receive. What we receive is “grace upon grace”, which v17 explains: the first grace refers to the law, for in the law God shows us His holiness and how He wants His people to live. The second grace, is the “grace and truth” that is seen in Jesus Christ.
When we read the phrase “grace upon grace”, the (seasonal) image that comes to mind might be presents piled high under a Christmas tree — a parcel of grace, then on top of it more grace. The footnote in your Bible, however, might offer an alternative translation: “grace in place of grace”, which brings across the idea of superseding, surpassing grace. So is it upon, or in place of? In addition to, or replacing? The root word that the translators are grappling with is actually quite familiar (“anti”). From the fullness of Jesus Christ the Word, we receive a new grace in place of – anti – an older grace. The image that comes to mind, then, might be one of replacement, i.e. the second grace displaces the first.
Two graces, two gifts
How do we reconcile all this? A good place to begin is to note that both the law and the gift of Christ are gifts. Both are described as ‘grace’. John reminds us that both are good, and both come from the fullness of Jesus (v14, 16). This should steer us away from thinking that Christ is good, but the Law is bad. Rather, the law of Moses is a gracious gift and reveals a bit of the Ruler behind the rules, but Christ Jesus is better still. What He gives replaces, supersedes, surpasses the first good gift of the Law so that we now receive and indeed cling to the better gift – His life and His death – in place of the law. And yet even though it is surpassed, the Law still retains a place as a continual pointer, an eternal herald, to the Christ whose arrival it anticipated and announced. The Law too, like John, is a witness to Christ, such that whatever Moses gives, God’s children do not lose. They simply have it all the fuller in Christ.
For instance, Jesus proclaims Himself as Lord of the Sabbath (c.f. Matt 12:1-8, Mark 2:23-28, Lk 6:1-5), which transforms the people’s understanding of the Sabbath — not just a keeping of laws, but finding true rest.
Another example might be the cleanliness laws. Lepers were unclean under the Mosaic law (c.f. Lev 13-14), and are still unclean in the NT. Jesus doesn't look at a leper and say: nothing wrong with him. But Jesus doesn't walk away like all the others either. Instead, He moves towards these ‘forbidden’ groups of people (c.f. Matt 8:1-4), and when He comes into contact with them, their contagion does not spread and does not move from the leper to Jesus. Instead, Jesus’ holiness moves outwards, and it is the leper who is changed. The forces of death that leprosy represented are repelled, removed, dealt with. So it turns out that not just the Sabbath but the cleanliness codes set the stage for Christ. And we could keep going. The point is this: the Law is a gracious gift. But here is one better still. As we move through the rest of John’s gospel, and step out of the Prologue and into the dust and dirt of the story, we encounter the Word made flesh and behold His grace and truth. We too may now receive the abundance of grace through how He holds out not just the holiness of the Law, but the wonderful fulfilment of the Law's requirement according to God's free and abundant favour. It is grace upon grace indeed.
What does this mean for us? We praise God that we can receive Him in His fullness. When we look at Jesus, we are not just called to admire Him from afar. When we read of Him as full of grace and truth, it doesn’t just stop as an intellectual inquiry. He calls us to come and receive from His fullness. Those who are the children of God receive grace and truth for this is our inheritance (John 1:12). Will we treasure and love it?
The One and Only Son
We listened in on Moses’ conversation with God on Sinai in Exodus 33 earlier. Exo 33:20 ends the conversation this way: You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live. We are not permitted to look upon the face of God, and yet at the same time, there is a longing to do so that fills the OT. The Psalmists often write about seeking His face always (Psalm 104) or their desire to be shown the light of His countenance (Psalm 80). These cries are answered in the Incarnation. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and made the Father known. And they are answered in full because the one who became flesh is fully God without any kind of compromise.
John also takes great care to emphasize the unique nature of this Son and this God. In John 1:18, and also in John 1:13, 3:16, John describes the Christ as the “one and only God”, or the “one and only Son” (c.f. John 1:14, 18), as if to make doubly sure that though you and I and all who believe do become children of God (John 1:12), we are not the Son of God. We are sons and daughters, but there is only one Son.
What does it mean that this Son is “with God”? Other translations help us to understand this. The NIV describes it as "in closest relationship”, while the KJV says, “in the bosom of the Father”. The NLT writes “near to the Father's heart”. We get a picture of intimacy! This is such a lovely ending to John’s Prologue, because where v1-2 establish the position (that the Word and God were together in the beginning), v18 takes a bright red crayon and colors in the relation: the Word is 'at the Father's side', a child in the lap of the Father, a beloved Son. The God who to Israel was a consuming fire is to the Son a Father whose lap he lies in.
What is your picture of God? If John 1:1 brought to mind a picture of two kings – co-regents, jointly reigning, sharing the throne, and your historical dramas have made you justifiably wonder: Is it tense? Is it political? Is there suspicion and in-fighting? Will there be a coup?
John tells us that they are side by side like a son cradled in the Father’s lap, hugged to the Father’s bosom.. The fullness of truth cannot be provided by someone who has only seen it peeping through their fingers or through a veil – not even Moses - you need someone who has beheld it in full and taken it in. That someone is the Son who has eternally been 'at the Father's side'. The one who speaks is an insider. When this Son speaks as the Word, He will express the very inner self of God, because no one knows the Father like the Son does. Today, if we yearn to know what the Father is like, we don’t have to guess or be in the dark about it. All we have to do is look at the Son.
This has practical implications about how we know about God and relate to Him. Perhaps some of us might wonder what God is like towards pain. Does He care? We do not have to guess. When we see Jesus in the gospels encountering pain and sickness, He wants to reach out and to touch it and to heal it. So it is with God.
Again, what is God like towards sin? Look at Jesus Christ, and see how He moves towards sinners. He seeks them out. He finds the lost. Sin is no barrier to His resolve to rescue them.
All that God wants to say to us is wrapped up in and revealed through Jesus. To know what God is like, we look at Jesus. It should be the joy of the Christian to know Jesus according to the gospels, taught by His apostles, and foretold by the Old Testament. We should continually reject ‘Jesus-es’ that we invent for ourselves or make in the image of our causes and concerns, and continually be renewed in the knowledge of our Creator and Redeemer. Jesus the Christ is at the heart of what God wants to say to us. And the Christmas message, concealed in John 1:18, continues to tell us that God wants to be known by us. He is inviting you to Himself through Christ.
Won’t we come and meet Him?