The Word Became Flesh

Matthew starts Christmas with a family tree. Luke starts with a priest in the temple. But John goes further back. Before the manger. Before the stars. Before anything at all. In the beginning.

John was one of Jesus' closest friends, a fisherman from Galilee who had walked with him for years. Early Christian writers tell us that, as an old man, John lived in the great city of Ephesus, and there he wrote down his Gospel. He wanted his readers, Jews and Greeks alike, to understand who Jesus really was. And so he does not begin with angels or shepherds. He begins by echoing the very first words of the Bible.

In the beginning was the Word, John writes, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. A word is how we show what is in our minds. When God spoke at creation, things came into being. Let there be light, and there was light. John says that Word was not just a sound God made. The Word was a person, with God from the start, sharing everything God is. All things were made through him. Not one thing that exists was made without him. The stars, the seas, the sparrows, you.

And in him was life, John says, and that life was the light of everyone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Then John tells something sad. The Word came into the very world he had made, and the world did not recognise him. He came to his own people, and many of his own did not receive him. Think of it. The maker walks into his own workshop, and the things he made do not know his face.

But that is not the end. To everyone who did receive him, who trusted in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. Not by being born into the right family, John says, but born of God. And then comes the sentence at the heart of Christmas. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The one who made the stars became a baby. The Word that spoke the world into being learned to say his first words, in a home, among neighbours.

When John says the Word lived among us, the Greek verb he uses is closely related to the word for a tent. A more literal translation would be: he pitched his tent among us. John's Jewish readers would have thought of the tabernacle, the tent in the wilderness where God's glory came down to live among his people after the exodus. John is saying that God's glory now lives among us in a person.

The Word Became Flesh. You'll find it in John chapter one, verses one to fourteen. Christians read it every Christmas, because it tells us who the baby in the manger really is. So here is a question to carry with you. If the maker of everything came to live among us, how will you welcome him?