the centuries. Some readers may point out that I have overlooked important themes in this gospel. I make no claim to have exhausted its amazing treasury. I have only attempted to take a look at the riches in its vaults. I hope my efforts are not just explications but paths to understanding, avenues that lead to further explorations. If the reading of my meditations sparks reflection and insight into the symbolic universe of some early Christians and helps envision ways to live in the world, my efforts will have been amply rewarded.
1: In the Beginning Was the Logos
The claim that the Logos incarnate is God comes as a stunning revelation to us at the very beginning of the gospel According to John. We have not been prepared for this amazing claim. The gospel does not build up a case for it. Yet we are intrigued by it, wanting to find evidence for it. This quest will demand from us an understanding of the symbolic universe within which the gospel was conceived – a universe with apparently inexhaustible deposits of meaning, undoubtedly worthy of being extracted. All the biblical books, surely, have rich reservoirs of meaning, but this gospel, with its unique claim that the incarnate Logos is God, surpasses them all.
The two early Christian hymns included in the New Testament also proclaim that Jesus is the human manifestation of a pre-existent divine being, but they do not assert that he is God. Philippians 2:6 – 11 says that this divine being was “in the form” of God, not God, and that he had no desire for “equality with God.” Colossians 1:15 – 20, for its part, describes this being as “the first-born of all creatures,” rather than as God.
From beginning to end this book presupposes knowledge of how its language works. On the surface its language appears quite rudimentary, pedestrian, with a rather limited vocabulary. Students of Greek are given their first exercises from the text of According to John because of its simplicity. Those who do not become aware soon that this beginner’s Greek carries within it many profound levels of meaning, however, are not paying attention to what they are reading.
For Greek Orthodox Christianity and its many daughters, the gospel According to John is the canon within the canon. Jesus’ bringing eternal life (something human beings have never had but dearly desire) makes possible the “divinization” of Christians. The Son who was glorified on the cross made possible the restoration of the divine image God had originally implanted on Adam, which he lost by sinning. Divinization is the process by which step by step through spiritual retreats and contemplation Christians have the image of God re-implanted on them. For this Christianity the image of God as a baby on his mother’s bosom is the central icon. Communion with the icon of the Mother of God and the incarnate God child is paramount. The crucifix, while present in Orthodox churches, is not the center of devotional life. It is in the incarnation, in the becoming flesh, that redemption was actualized for those who believe. This is the theme of the whole gospel According to John, and I am identifying it at the beginning of my meditations because if one does not know what the gospel is about it is impossible to understand it.
According to John teaches only one doctrine. When it was first proclaimed this doctrine was revolutionary, radical to the extreme, and for proclaiming it the Johannine Christians were misunderstood by other Christians and persecuted by Jews. The one doctrine of this gospel is that Jesus is God, a doctrine that has never lacked those who flatly reject it.
A western Christian who also made this doctrine central, and was also misunderstood by his fellow Christians while alive, was the extraordinary Dane of the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard. He understood well the theme of According to John, insisting that what is required is not to accept as God the Risen Christ who has triumphed over death, or the Christ who twenty centuries of Christian theological elaborations proclaims as God, or the one who twenty centuries of western culture presents as the hero of its success. We are not required to recognize as God the Jesus of the miracles, feeding the thousands with a few pieces of bread and fish, walking on water, resurrecting the dead. We are required to recognize as God the Jesus who was the son of Mary and Joseph, a poor carpenter’s apprentice who did not look different from any other poor journeyman in Nazareth. Nothing signaled him as distinct, special, worthy of admiration. The Jesus who looks just like the milkman and the baker of the corner — this Jesus is God. Christians must become contemporaries of Jesus and, paradoxically, recognize as God this undistinguished man who looks just like every one else.
Kierkegaard’s depiction of Jesus captures what is at the core of According to John: Jesus has to be believed as God among us. He is not a man with a privileged divine connection, a blessed man with a double portion of the Spirit. Whether Jesus during his life made open claims to divinity, as this gospel reports, or whether he imposed silence on any one who would make divine claims for him, as the synoptic gospels report, is a matter to be debated. It seems that many people in the first century believed in the existence of gods passing themselves for human beings among them, as Petronius in the Satyricon reports. However, it seems to me that most people in that time would have been just as skeptical about the presence of an incarnated god among them as most people are in the twenty-first century. Thus, Kierkegaard’s argument is valid: faith is not built on evidence. Of course, if it negates the evidence it may cause psychological damage. To believe is difficult. It requires the intellect to go beyond the evidence.
The gospel According to Mark focuses on the passion that culminates in a crucifixion. The journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is staged with three Passion Predictions (Mk. 8:31; 9:31; 10:33 – 34). He is going to Jerusalem to give his life “as a ransom for many” (Mk. 10:45). This declaration is the theological message of According to Mark. According to John, on the other hand, idealizes the crucifixion. Its narrative climax is not Jesus’ prediction of the crucifixion after the confession of Peter. In fact there are no Passion Predictions, and the confession of Peter is given a totally different content (6:68). Its climax confronts the reader in its first verse, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God” (1:1). A few verses later readers learn that the Logos became flesh. They are immediately facing two very technical words: logos and flesh.
By joining these two words the narrator has superimposed two things which in the rest of the gospel are considered to belong to two quite different worlds. Anticipating the use of Johannine language, the Word, the Logos belongs “above,” while flesh belongs “below.” This mismatch creates the tension that informs the rest of the story, and establishes the nature of the problem to be solved by the incarnation.
The theologians of the Hebrew Scriptures had already given a significant role to “the Word of Yahve.” The prophets who received “a word of the Lord” understood it as a concrete thing with independent existence. They were mere agents of the transcendent Word of Yahve. In this connection it must be kept in mind that in an oral culture a word has a concrete, if not material, existence. The spoken word is powerful. Once spoken it cannot be retracted. It is like an arrow that has been dispatched from a bow. It cannot be stopped on its tracks by the one speaking. The story of Isaac’s blessing of Jacob, much to the dismay of Esau, makes this clear (Gen. 27:33 – 35). The Word of the Lord in the Scriptures, like some other attributes of God, acquired a quasi-independent status. This development was apparently encouraged by the recognition that the ancient anthropomorphic presentations of God were problematic as the Hebraic culture became more reflexive, and heaven and earth were conceived to be further and further apart. As the Wise Man says: “God is in heaven, and you upon earth” (Eccl. 5:2). The distinction of the two realms may not be overlooked. Thus the Wisdom, the Glory, and the Word of Yahve came to be seen as divine agents, or hypostases of God. In the Wisdom Literature, which is quite international in outlook, both the Word and Wisdom are credited with having been the agents of creation (Ps. 33:6; Prov. 8:12, 27 – 30). When the Johannine Christians identified the divine being who became incarnate as Logos, they were influenced by the tradition of the Word as the agent of creation, as the linking of Logos to “in the beginning” suggests; the following words make this explicit: “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (1:3).
Also, it is quite likely that they understood the philosophical connotations of the word logos. In that context, logos refers to the capacity to think, to entertain ideas, to express these ideas in words, to construct discourses using words. It is almost indistinguishable from the mind that thinks. The concepts of reason and mind, it