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| Essential 100 -- Jesus and J the B | | Date Created: Mar 21, 2005, 09:44 AM |
51 — Monday March 21 — John 1:1-18
I find the opening of John's gospel so peculiar. First, there's the abstract, mystical nature of it. The very opening must be a deliberate attempt at paralleling Old Testament Scripture: "In the beginning..." But the OT gets right down to (pardon the expression) earth, taking the focus off of God in eternity and down to how people got here and got so messed up. John instead talks about another figure with God. In fact, where the OT begins "In the beginning, God...", John starts with "In the beginning was the Word..." clearly asserting this Word shared God's eternality -- could stand in the very place of God. What is this Word? Verse 14: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. This gospel prologue will win no friends among Jews. If it's not true, it is rank heresy and blasphemy.
So there's that. But the second curious feature is the way that woven into the fabric of this mystical almost philosophical wandering is the human John the Baptist. Isn't that weird? I can easily imagine a Christian writer today getting as mystical about Jesus as the author of John's gospel, but I can't imagine someone today writing it in a way that brings J the B up every 3 paragraphs!
I think this implies either that John the Baptist was extremely important in the writer's own spiritual journey or else he reckons that J the B is important to his readers. And in either case, his message is that Jesus is orders of magnitute greater. |
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