“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. John bear witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
For the last several week we have been studying John 1:1-4 with attention to verse 14:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made… And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…”
We all know full well these are difficult words to understand, but difficult or not, they are understandable. We also know full well that from the start of John’s Gospel we enter a state of being very different from the state of being we would call our everyday life. Everyday life has a beginning, a middle, and an end — there is the reality of history that has broken us and made us and there is the reality of a future to anticipate and to prepare for.
But what kind of beginning is that in John 1:1? It isn’t everyday life is it? John 1:1 is a beginning that always is, a beginning that has no beginning, no time, no past, no future. And no place. All that is, is God. God is all in all and God is perfect. But how on earth do we talk about that? We are creatures of flesh, mass, gravity, physics; we are, as well, intellect, we are spirit, we experience emotions, and we have the capacity to love or not to love. So it is awfully hard for us to grasp anything without space and time. John’s beginning is an eternal beginning, the perpetual beginning, frequently referred to in the Bible as “eternal life,” — that is the life of God the Blessed Trinity, before there was any creature at all.
There is only God; nothing else whatsoever. There was no imperfection, no need, no privation, no loneliness, no failure, no sin, only God. So why would God create anything at all? A lot of good people have asked that question with different measures of success, but there is one line of thought that is entirely wrong and that is the line of thinking that somehow God needed to create the universe because something was lacking in the beginning. So for example, it would be a mistake to think that the absence of creation was an absence of relation. It would be a mistake to think that God was somehow solitary, all alone, forlorn, bereft prior to creation. Why? Why would it be a mistake to think of God as solitary prior to the creation of things? Because there was never a time when the Father was not the Father, therefore there was never a time when the Son was not the Son, and there was never a time when the perfect love between the Father and the Son was not manifested in the Holy Spirit. The point I wish to make is that the Father did not create the angelic host, nor did he create the heavens and the earth teeming with life and nor did he crown his creation with man out of need — God did not create because he was lonely, he did not create because there was anything whatsoever lacking in God. He did not create mankind in his image to be his companion because he lacked companionship. God the Father called those things which were not into being, he brought forth creation, out of pure divine self-giving love. For several weeks we have spent much time in the eternal abode of the Blessed Trinity. It takes some getting used to, but we do begin to grasp it. Then two weeks ago we landed on the verses 6 – 8:
“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.”
It is as though one moment we in the eternal abode of the Blessed Trinity, in the bosom of the Father, then suddenly we are tumbling down into the wilderness where we land somewhere around the Jordan River where a preacher, dressed in ragged camel skins, declares to us, with great urgency, that we had better get ready because what we just left — the abode of God Almighty — is about to break into this world, break into our everyday life, and nothing will ever be the same. John the Baptist is clear that the One who is coming into the world is coming from the abode of God Almighty:
“John bear witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.”
John the Baptist’s declaration is simply this: There is the Coming One, he is the Messiah, he is greater than any of the other Prophets, he is eternal — “He was before me…” And John the Apostle’s of the Prologue may be summed up this way: Jesus the Messiah is the One the whole world has been waiting for; He is greater than Moses & the Prophets; he is the Word of the Father; he is the Creator himself; he is true God and true man; he is the only One who knows God inside and out and he has told us as only he could what God is like:
“For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”
The Greek of this text is much stronger than just about any translations. A far more specific:
“No one has ever yet seen God; the only begotten God, the one (who has his) being (his natural home) in the bosom of the Father — that one has made the Father known.”
A couple of weeks back I pointed out that two extraordinary people are always major figures in the narratives of our Lord’s birth. They were able to identify Jesus’ true identity because both of them were given a supernatural revelation — and their supernatural revelation is from the beginning. Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, was informed by an Angel named Gabriel that she was chosen by God to conceive in her womb a child who would in fact be the true Son of God as well as her own true Son even though she was and would remain a true virgin. John the Baptist as we have seen is the other central figure who first witnessed to Jesus while still in his mother’s womb and to the very day he died he celebrated the life of the pre-existent Messiah, who was also his cousin.
These two extraordinary people, the Blessed Virgin Mary and John Baptist stand out not only for their grasp, through supernatural revelation, of Jesus’ true identity, but they stand out as well for, their humility, their piety, their faith, their devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I think they are the two most consecrated, godly, devout, and personally holy people to have every lived other than Jesus the Messiah himself. What they have in common is their personal holiness and their trust in God’s special revelation. This is why, in Orthodox parish churches, the icons of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist are always prominent at the Altar of the Churches. They are always displayed pointing to an icon of Christ and the Altar where the Sacrament is consecrated.
The icons that I have commissioned for All Saints follow that same holy pattern with Mary the Mother of God on the Gospel side and John the Baptist on the Epistle side — both on the wall over Altar and both of them pointing to Crucifix and the Chalice. Everything that matters in life is gathered up in that holy image: Jesus Christ is true God, the Word of the Father. And this God became a real human being. He has always been God and he always will be God but has not always been a human being. Furthermore he became a human being just like all of us: he had a Mother. In fact God became Mary’s flesh; as sure as you are the flesh of your mother, God became the flesh of his Mother, thus the Church’s august title for Mary is Theotokos: “Mother of God.” As sure as your blood is blood from your mother, so the blood that flowed down the Cross was the blood from the Blessed Virgin Mary which is to say our blood. Furthermore God did not shed his humanity when he ascended back to his Father. God’s human flesh, his human nature, received from Mary his Mother is now part and parcel of God’s reality and it always will be. He will never cease to be a human being.
“No one has ever yet seen God; the only begotten God, the one (who has his) being (his natural home) in the bosom of the Father — that one has made the Father known.”
I have made this point before: In Genesis we have the narrative of man made in the image of God while in life of Jesus Christ we have the narrative of God made in the image of man. In the story of God’s life made flesh we see not only the uncreated glory of the only begotten Son, but we also see the created glory of his creature man. The Incarnation was not merely God’s response to sin; the Incarnation is not God’s backup plan; the Incarnation is God’s perfect will, his loving will to enable his creature man to participate in his divine life, to enable his creature man to realize our destiny for the beatific vision, to behold God face-to-face. And that has always been God’s intention. The only begotten God who is from the “bosom of the Father” was made flesh in order that he might returned to the “bosom of the Father” and there he dwells this very day in eternal splendor as the Son of Mary.