The Word made flesh

A word for the week

The Word became flesh. John could have opened his story of Jesus with a birth, the way Luke does, or a family tree, the way Matthew does. Instead he reaches all the way back before the beginning and gives us this: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And then, after all that height, the sentence the whole book turns on: the Word became flesh, and lived among us.

Take the word "Word" first. In John's world it meant more than a spoken sound. It meant the reason running through everything, the logic that holds the universe together, the mind behind the world. John says that this, the very thinking of God, the pattern under all that exists, is who Jesus is. Not a good man God adopted. Not a prophet God sent. The Word that was there before anything was made, through whom everything was made, is the one who shows up in a body in Galilee.

That is a staggering claim, and John states it as plainly as he can. But the more staggering word in the sentence is the small one: flesh. The Word became flesh. Not became an idea, or a feeling, or a fine teaching. Flesh. Skin and hunger and tiredness and tears. God did not stay safely above, in pure spirit, and send us a memo. He came all the way down into a body, into the mess and weight of being an actual human being, and lived among us. The word John uses is closer to "pitched his tent" among us. He moved into the neighborhood.

Weigh why that matters. It means God was not content to be understood at a distance. He wanted to be with us, on our level, in our skin, close enough to touch. Most religion reaches upward, trying to climb to God. John says the direction was reversed. God came down. The infinite made itself small enough to be held. And he did it not in a palace but, as the rest of the Gospels tell us, in a poor family, in an occupied country, among ordinary people who mostly did not recognize him. He came to his own, John says sadly, and his own did not receive him.

But some did. And here is the promise tucked into the passage: to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. That is the whole offer of the faith in one line. The Word came down and made a way for us to come up, not by our climbing, but by our receiving. You do not have to ascend to God. You have to open the door to the God who has already come down to you.

We saw his glory, John says, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. He is not writing theory. He is remembering a face. He had watched this man eat and weep and touch the sick and die, and he is telling us: that was the Word. That was God, in flesh, close enough to lean against. The whole year we are about to spend at this table is spent with him, the Word made flesh, who came down so that we could know him. Start there. Everything else grows from it.