Gospel of John, Chapter 1
Continuing with the first chapter of the Gospel of John, declaring that our Creator has spoken to us with the Word – the eternal Son became a flesh and blood human and named Jesus. This is all true. John saw it. “We have seen his glory,” he writes (verse 14). This is no wish-induced imaginative religion. John and others saw the greatness, the magnificence of Jesus. They saw the real God, the real Jesus, the real God/Man. They saw his true essence – who and what he really is. And there is nothing and no one like him – he is “the one and only.”
What they saw when they saw the Word in the flesh was grace and truth. John says Jesus was “full of grace and truth.” The Son of God living in the flesh teemed with grace and truth. He overflowed with grace and truth.
Grace. Let us not sentimentalize or dilute grace. For me, the best description of grace comes from a man named Will Campbell, a Baptist minister and civil rights activist in the 1960’s. In his autobiography, Brother to the Dragonfly, he tells how a friend asked him to sum up the message of Christianity. “I’m not too bright,” he told Campbell, “Keep it simple. In ten words or less, what’s the Christian message?” Campbell’s answer really gets to the essence of grace. He used only eight words. Will Campbell told his friend the meaning of Christianity is, “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” That is grace. We are all obnoxious, disagreeable, and inferior but God loves us anyway. (I understand that this contradicts the “you’re a hero and champion” mantra that everyone wants to hear and the American culture promotes all the time. Please keep reading – I am not going to beat you up.)
Grace means God can snatch you up and throw you into the pit of hell, but he lovingly picks you up and hugs you to himself. Grace means God can demand that you measure up to every command and rule and expectation that holiness requires, but he freely accepts you just as you are. Grace means God can tear you to pieces with one look, but he unconditionally does everything he can to hold you together. Grace means God can ignore you and leave you to your own and others’ foolishness, but he passionately comes to get you and make you his own. Grace means God could justly turn his back on the whole world but he becomes flesh and comes to live in the world and restore it to its original design. We are all bastards, but God loves us anyway.
Jesus, God in the flesh, was full of that. John saw it. When they met a traitorous, cheating tax-collector named Zacchaeus that everybody hated, Jesus went home with him and changed his life (Luke 19:1-10). When legalists brought a woman guilty of sexual wrongdoing, deserving the law’s death sentence by stoning, Jesus looked her in the eye and told her he was not going to condemn her and changed her life (John 8:2-11). The grace that Jesus poured out must have shocked everyone around – with it he completely disrupted the accepted values and customs of the culture. And with it he gave abundant life. Over and over, John saw it and felt it for himself – real grace overflowing from Jesus. In this Gospel, we hear John telling what he saw so we can hear the Word speaking grace to us.
And truth. “Full of truth.” Reality. The way it really is. The Word understands what people and the world and things and circumstances actually are. He gets it, better than anyone else. Jesus was the smartest man who ever walked on this planet.2 Paul the apostle wrote that in him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). When Jesus was 12 years old he hung out with the Jewish scholars in the Temple, listening and asking and answering questions. The scholars were amazed at how sharp he was. Jesus was brilliant, a sheer genius.
John saw this mastermind in action over and over again as he worked in partnership with the Father and the Spirit. Jesus knew how to make chemical changes occur so water became wine. He knew how to maneuver the laws of nature so he could change weather patterns and stop storms. He knew how to dissect and dismantle a religion that had become nothing but tradition, rules, and temple-building-centered. He knew how to confront and trounce the Evil which was destroying individuals, families, and communities. He knew how to get inside people’s inner thoughts and feelings and needs and restore them to wholeness and integrity. He knew how to bring humans into a new relationship with God. Teeming with truth.
We need truth. You see, we (all humanity) are being scammed. A scam, or a con, is designed to make the victim, the so-called mark, believe that something is true when it is not. The mark is tricked into making decisions and taking actions based on ideas or events he considers authentic when they are actually fake. They look true, sound true, seem true, but they are false. The targeted victim does not deliberately act on things that are bogus. He would behave differently if he knew the truth. But he is not seeing the truth; he is in the dark, so he takes the actions which the scammer wants him to take; he gets taken in and swindled. Humanity has been conned about who we are and who God is – what is our identity and what is God’s identity, what is our destiny and what is God’s purpose. So we make decisions and take actions based on falseness. It may not seem like it, but we are in the dark; we are not seeing the truth. John tells us, “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world” (verse 9). The Word, Jesus the Messiah, brought truth into the world for us.
So when Jesus tells us what we need and how we can live, we can trust that he knows what he is talking about. He is the smartest man who ever lived. When the angel told Mary that she would have a baby, he said, “He will be great… and will reign…forever; his kingdom will never end” (Luke 1:32-33). In other words, “Mary, he’s going to know how to run things the right way forever.” Truth was becoming flesh! John and the others who followed Jesus saw this happening again and again. In this Gospel, we hear the Word speaking truth into the deepest parts of people’s hearts and we hear it for ourselves.
When you hear the Word you will not hear mere sentimentalism; you will not hear practical life hacks; you will not hear principles for success; you will not hear how to be religious; you will not hear tips for behavior management. You will hear far more than any of that. You will hear what God has to say. The Word will confront and challenge you. He will astonish and amaze you. He will delight and empower you. He will ask about and speak to the depth of your soul. He will offer light, life, and hope. He will invite you into a thrilling new way to be. The Word, Jesus the Messiah, will say what you really need to hear. Real grace. Real truth.
Footnotes
2 See Dallas Willard, “Who Is Your Teacher?”, https://dwillard.org/resources/articles/who-is-your-teacher