John Shore examines John 1:1-5

Here's the NIV text of John 1:1-5:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

God, that's beautiful. It just rips your breath away.
Um ... but if I can say, I think that last sentence (which is verse 5) should stand alone as its own paragraph. There's a real break in thought there. It would really drive home the beauty of that sentence -- and enhance what comes before it -- if it was pulled out, and presented in isolation.
Anyway, as to the passage as a whole: If there's denser text anywhere in the Bible, I don't know it. What Christian hasn't deeply wondered at the word "Word" in that first utterance? Why word? Why ... such a common, everyday noun, right there? Why not tree, or Core Idea, or ... footprint, or something. Why word?
John! Whatup?
Well, here's my understanding of it: What the first four sentences of John are telling us is that the trinity is real. It is describing the fact that God comes in three modes: Absolute and unchanging ("God"), exuberantly creative ("Word"), and personally and specifically inside of each and every man ("the light of men").
And there's the unutterable mystery of the three-in-one God. There, in four simple sentences, is the entirety of our religion.
See, now that's writing.
Jesus, of course, is the Word. Jesus (um ... as I see it) is the active principle of God, the phenomenon through which God's unending potential is manifested in real space and real time; he's the perfect means by which God's absolute, undifferentiated power is Actually Expressed.
And "Word" perfectly captures that extraordinary dynamic. A thing doesn't really exist -- at least, not within the human realm of experience -- until it has been named, until someone has attached a word to it that, from then on out, refers exclusively to that thing. Naming something marks the finality of the process by which something gains its own separate identity; it's how a thing transforms from vague or unknown, to specific and very known.
Putting a word to something is how, essentially and substantively, that whatever-it-is gets created.
It's how a thing moves from the world of undivided and absolute God, to the differentiated, relative, human world in which God became Jesus.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
And there it is: by the power of the active, creative force of God which ultimately personified itself into the Jesus we today worship, all things that ever were or will be were created. Jesus is the Word through which God created us, and our world.
In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
And there you are.
And here we are!





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