Psalm 145:1-13 John 1:1-18
The Advent of the King’s Son: Introduction
I would like to begin our series on the Gospel of John with a story that takes place at the end of time.
Immense crowds of people from every period of history were gathered before the Great White Throne of God. It was an unruly, angry, seething mob of deceased humanity.
“How dare God judge me!” someone shouted. “What does he know about my sufferings?”
“Look!” a woman cried out. “Look at these numbers on my arm. All of us were branded like this when they put us in those concentration camps! But that’s not all they did. They starved us. They humiliated us. They beat us. And, when we were no longer of any use to them, they gassed us.”
“What about this?” a young man screamed, revealing an ugly rope burn around his neck. “I was dragged behind a horse for miles. I was kicked, spat upon, beaten, and then finally hung from a tree…and there they stood around and laughed as I slowly suffocated…for no crime other than being a member of an oppressed minority.”
And so, one by one, each and every person shouted out their complaints against God. What did God know about life on earth? What did God know about suffering? And if he did know about suffering, why didn’t he do something about it?
“Before he can stand in judgement over us,” someone yelled, “he must suffer like we suffered!”
“Yes!” they all agreed. “Let us judge him and pronounce a sentence against him! Let him be born in scandalous circumstances…let him be considered illegitimate by his own people! His family must be poverty-stricken laborers under the harsh rule of a powerful colonial force. He must have no rights of his own and he must be homeless. Let his father die when he is a young man and let him be denied any further education because he must take care of his mother and siblings. Let him be repeatedly misunderstood, misused, abused, opposed and slandered and plotted against – betrayed and deserted by those he considered his closest friends – falsely accused and condemned – spat on and ridiculed and mercilessly beaten even though innocent – let him be denied a proper trial – let his innocent life be exchanged for that of a true criminal – let him be executed – condemned to die an excruciatingly painful death usually reserved for the worst criminals. Let him be humiliated, stripped naked of his only possessions – let him be mocked and laughed at while he is slowly suffocating – let him be buried in a borrowed tomb. Let him feel what it is like to be despised and rejected!”
As the last person shrieked out these demands, they all turned to face the one sitting on the throne. But as they beheld him, a great silence descended over the plains. Suddenly everyone realised that he had already served the sentence…he had already paid the penalty.
Now, in our Gospel lesson for today, the Apostle John gives us a glimpse of how God came to share in our sufferings.
Verse 14 of John chapter 1 is surely one of the most significant and memorable sentences ever written. “The Word became flesh and came to dwell among us. We saw his glory – glory like that of a father’s only son – full of grace and truth.”
The implications of this statement are limitless. It has provided believers over the centuries with a key to understanding the mystery of Jesus Christ. In many ways, it represents the heart and the climax of the Gospel. Indeed, it could be said that the remaining twenty-one chapters of this book were written to explain its significance.
In this verse, we have disclosed to us, the mystery of what theologians call the Hypostatic Union. Here Jesus is presented to us as both perfectly divine and perfectly human. The Word took on flesh…two complete and distinct natures at the same time. There is no merging of the two natures…no mingling…two separate natures in one person. Truly God and yet truly human. Never abandoning his infinite “Creatorhood” and yet choosing to live in finite “creaturehood”. God in the very midst of humanity.
Now, of course, we already have a picture, albeit imperfect and incomplete, of what this looks like in the Old Testament and, I believe, John wanted us to pick up on that connection. The Greek word John used here…a word that our translations usually render “dwelt among us” or “lived among us” or “made his dwelling among us”…is actually the word “tabernacled”…“The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us”. God came and set up his tent among us. Now, where have we heard that before? In Exodus, right? So all sorts of images should be popping around in your heads right now…deliverance from slavery, victory over an enemy, a gracious and abiding Divine presence, God’s law, God’s forgiveness, and so on.
The Tabernacle was set up slap bang in the centre of the Israelites encampment. All the tribes pitched their tents around it to indicate that all of life revolved around God’s presence with his people. The pillar of cloud and of fire hovered over the Tabernacle…the ten commandments were kept in the Tabernacle…sacrifice for sin was made in the Tabernacle…atonement, forgiveness, judgements…the whole of life was regulated by what happened in and around the Tabernacle.
The Tabernacle was a focus…a daily reminder of who they were as a people in terms of who their God was.
The same is true of Solomon’s Temple. The same cloud of glory covered the Temple as it did the Tabernacle and the Temple served as the same central focus for belief and for behaviour.
It is interesting to note at this point, that later in the Gospel of John, Jesus referred himself as the Temple. Remember? “Destroy this temple,” he said, “and in three days I will raise it up.” And John tells us that Jesus meant his body…
Now, let’s just pause here for a moment to allow this to sink in. Everything the Tabernacle and Temple represented…deliverance, victory, presence, power, glory…everything now rests on Jesus.
John deliberately used words to describe Jesus that would recall all these images because he wanted to make it clear that Jesus is the reality and fulfilment of what these pictures represented. Just as God was with the Israelites in the wilderness…just as God was with his people in the Promised Land…so God is with us in Jesus.
That’s why this same Apostle John, in another book, spoke of Jesus as a Temple standing in the midst of his people…set in the New Jerusalem…a place where there is no need for sun or moon or any other such light as the glory of God is its light…the glory that reveals who God is as surely as light reveals whatever it shines upon.
Remember, in Exodus 33 when Moses asked to see the glory of God? How did God respond? How did God show Moses his glory? “I,” God said to Moses, “I will cause my goodness to pass in front of you…I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in love and faithfulness.” God’s glory is revealed through his nature…his character…and this glory is now, John said, made manifest in Jesus.
By choosing his words deliberately and carefully, the Apostle John caused his readers to recall all the relevant imagery of the Old Testament regarding God’s self-manifestation to his people as well as his gracious and merciful and powerfully protective presence with his people…all now focussed in on the person of Jesus.
Some philosophers, known as Docetists, once insisted that as matter was essentially evil and Jesus was holy and pure, then his body must have been purely phantasmal…not real. In other words, according to these men, Jesus only seemed to be human. His human form was nothing more than an illusion.
But this flies in the face of what John was saying in this verse. John insisted that the eternal Word took on flesh…in other words, he took on human form…a real body This is a truth that flows through the rest of the New Testament as well. Paul said in Romans 8 that God sent “his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” In Philippians 2 he said that while Jesus was God, he chose to take upon himself the form of a human. In 1 Timothy 2 he referred to Jesus as the “Man Christ Jesus.” There was no doubt in the minds of the New Testament authors that Jesus was both fully God and fully human.
But then we also must contend with the opposite extreme. The denial of Jesus’ divinity. In the so-called search for the historical Jesus, the godhead of Jesus is often denied and the humanhood is affirmed. Jesus is demoted, if you will, to a mere creature – a man…a good man, but a man, nonetheless. No more than a moral teacher or a philosopher. But both these extremes are challenged by John’s words.
For John and the other New Testament authors, the powerful creative Word…the one who is both with God and who is God…the one who has always been there even from before the beginning…this one…he took upon his divine person the nature of one of his own creations…God took on the form of a human being and he came and Tabernacled here on this planet for one purpose only…to deliver us from slavery, to conquer our enemy, and to bring us to himself.
As such, the doctrine of the incarnation…the Hypostatic Union…is the climax of salvation history. If the Old Testament teaches us anything it is that we cannot save ourselves. We are as powerless as were the Israelite slaves in Egypt. We were bound and enslaved and imprisoned by one far stronger than ourselves. Only someone greater than ourselves…indeed, someone greater than what has enslaved us…can rescue us.
But this means that no human being, even the best of us, could rescue us simply because everyone of us is in the same predicament…we are all enslaved. All have sinned, the Scriptures tell us. Even our best deeds are flawed. Not one of us is perfect. And, as such, we all bear the same penalty. We are all alienated from our only source of life because of our collective and individual sin. And therefore, we all live in the inescapable shadow of death.
So, we are presented with a dilemma. The penalty is ours and we must pay it. But the penalty is death and, as we only have one life to live, we perish in the fulfilment of our sentence. We cannot pay our own penalty as we are guilty. No one else can pay our penalty as they are equally guilty. So, how can we be rescued?
We can only be rescued if the one who alone can pay the penalty can pay it as a human being…and for this reason, the incarnation…the Hypostatic Union…the Creator taking on the form of the created…is the only solution.
Of course, the incarnation itself does not save us, but it makes deliverance possible. In other words, without the incarnation we cannot have the crucifixion or the resurrection. The author of the letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus became human so that as a human he could pay the penalty for humans, thereby defeating and destroying the one who had the power of death – that is the devil – our jailer or our enslaver, if you will.
But it is also true that the incarnation of the eternal Word demonstrates God’s identification with us in our human existence…particularly in our weakness and our suffering. There is no parallel anywhere in any other religion or ideology or philosophy. There is no god like our God…who comes to share our misery with us. There is no god who understands all the uncertainties of life as does our God. He bore it all. He came to show us that God understands, and that God cares, and that God was willing to do something about our predicament…to take a penalty he imposed on other, upon himself…to pay our penalty on our behalf…as our substitute.
Who could ever judge such a God as our God? Who could ever point a finger at him and accuse him of not understanding our situation or of not being willing to do something about it?
When we look at Jesus we see that God specifically chose to come into a world that had effectively rejected him to live as we live…to struggle as we struggle…to suffer as we suffer…all so that he might reconcile us to himself. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? God didn’t sin. God didn’t mess up his perfect creation. We sinned. We messed it up and we continue to mess it up. And yet…God was not only gracious enough to send us help, but he came to do what we could not.
And, as such, Jesus, both God and human, reveals to us the very heart of God. From the beginning, God desired to walk with us…to dwell with us…to tabernacle among us. And at the cross, Jesus showed us what steps he was prepared to take to make that possible – there at the cross he demonstrated the immeasurable depths of the love God has for us.
We remember this every time we participate in the Lord’s Supper…this is my body broken for you…this is my blood shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. In the bread and in the wine we see his glory…we see his grace…we see his truth.
Here we see a reminder that God knows…that God understands…that God cares…and that God is with us…always.
Shall we pray?
© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2022
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