Southwest Community Church
November 30
  • Come Thou Long Expected Jesus
  • All Who Are Thirsty

  • In the Beginning…

    Intro Series:
    A journey through the gospel of John - that will take us all the way from November 30th through April 12th - the Sunday after Easter!
    Have you ever read the gospel of John?
    Have you ever heard the gospel of John preached?
    Do you already know this gospel? (dangerous) Do you think that theological things are too “heady” for you? (also dangerous).
    An invitation to curiosity - whether you know a ton about the gospel of John already or whether you’ve never made it past the opening sentence or its most famous verse (John 3:16)
    Judy Fentress-Williams helps us:
    “John is the last of the Gospels in both canonical order and date of authorship… The exquisitely elusive words of this Gospel are directed to a faith community struggling with their identiy. Externally, there are ongoing pressures from the Roman Empire. Internally there are divisions over doctrine. The community to whom the Gospel is addressed is most likely diverse in ethnicity and religious backgrounds. There are competing theologies and doctrines, primarily centered on the answer to the question of who Jesus is. In response to this confusion, the Gospel presents a metaphorical universe, one that stands in stark contrast to the audience’s fractured reality, crafted to introduce them to the Jesus they all thought they already knew.”
    The Gospel of John is directed to a faith community struggling with their identity and feeling external and internal pressures.
    (Relate much?)
    And John’s Gospel is crafted to introduce its readers to the Jesus they all thought they already knew.
    8 themes of the gospel of John:
    Jesus and Creation
    origin & identity of Jkesus
    the Word made flesh reveals God
    human & divine held together in the Incarnation, in the God revealed in Jesus
    “God has fully committed God’s self to everything that it means to be human, and the human Jesus reveals the full divinity of God.” Karoline Lewis
    5. contrast between light and darkness
    6. witness as the primary category of discipleship - You want to follow Jesus? Pay attention to him - to who He is, what He does, what He says…
    7. children of God
    8. abundance
    Intro: The Prologue
    The first 18 verses of the first chapter of John’s gospel are often called the Prologue.
    John 1:1–18 NIV
    1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. 6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. 14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ”) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
    Our reading for today is just the opening - and I would like to invite all of you to be the “reader” this morning. We’ll read the text together, ok? As you are able, please prepare your hearts to read God’s Word by standing.
    John 1:1–2 NIV
    1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning.
    This is the Word of the Lord.
    THANKS BE TO GOD.
    When we read, “in the beginning” did you think “wait! I’ve heard this before?!”
    If not, let’s think together - where have we heard those words before in Scripture? “In the beginning…”
    Genesis 1:1–2 NIV
    1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
    John 1:1–2 NIV
    1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning.
    Why might the writer of this fourth gospel be wanting to make a connection to Genesis 1 for their readers?
    And why does John veer off from In the beginning GOD to In the beginning was THE WORD… waht’s happening here?
    I've invited my favourite linguist & bible translator to answer a few questions about the Prologue in John... Gordon? Would you come up here? A: The prologue to the Gospel of John is super poetic, but maybe a bit confusing. Why are we talking about a “word”, or rather “The Word”? What is “The Word”? Is it the Bible? Is it Jesus (always a safe answer in Sunday school), and if so, how does that work? G: When we translate from one language to another, there’s not always a one-to-one correspondence between one word (in the sense of the smallest independent bit of speech or writing) in one language and the other. If you’re speaking French, you have to choose between two words for “to know”; in Spanish, there are two different words for “to be”. In English, the word “run” has literally hundreds of different meanings. Now the various documents that make up the New Testament were originally written in ancient Greek (for which you can blame Alexander the Great). So when we translate them into English, we don’t want to bog down in explanations every time we come across a word with a bunch of meanings; we have to choose one word in English, but it won’t necessarily mean all the things that it could mean in Greek. John 1:1 is in Greek "en arche in o logos, ke o logos in pros ton theon, ke theos in o logos"; "logos" is the word that usually gets translated into "word" in English. A: What does "logos" mean in Greek? What are some different ways that "logos" could be translated? G: Originally it comes from an ancient proto-Indo-European root that linguists have reconstructed as combining a bunch of ideas around: thinking about things and then talking about them: to arrange, to discern, to say or to speak. The word “logos” is used a lot in the New Testament, and we translate it in various ways depending on context: sometimes it’s a single word “word”; sometimes it’s a whole speech; sometimes it’s an idea, or a plan, or a conversation or argument, or even a story. We do this a bit in English, too: you can talk about a "word of warning" or a "word of encouragement", which are usually more than one literal word. In John 1:1, translators or commentators have sometimes used the words "blueprint" or "idea" or even "living word". A: Which of these do you think John is trying to get at? G: I actually think that John is using "THE logos" in a bit of a technical sense. In classical Greece, philosophers used "logos" as a technical term for "rationality", it's about thinking clearly, about reasoned arguments. (That's where we get the English word "logical".) Eventually the philosophers started to use it in a cosmic sense for the reasonable principles and underlying logic of the universe itself; the very blueprint of creation. By the time the Gospel of John was written in the late 1st or early 2nd century, Jews had been interacting with Greek culture and philosophy for a few centuries; around the time of Christ, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandrea used the term “The Logos” to describe God’s rationality, God's thinking and speaking. The Logos is both God's conversation with God's self, and God's conversation with creation: Both God's blueprint, the organizing principle behind creation, and God's Word, the act of speech that brings God’s ideas into being in Genesis 1. So when John, who is quite familiar with Greek culture, mentions the Logos, his readers would have been familiar with this usage. To paraphrase John 1:1, God’s plan has been there since the beginning. God’s blueprint for the universe has always been “with” God (literally “all up in God’s face”). God’s conversation with God's self is in fact identical with God's existence. And as Andrea will unpack in the next few weeks, God’s Logos illuminates our human existence and drives back the darkness of our primordial separation from God. So, so far these would be familiar ideas about The Logos to John’s readers. A: So does John add anything new to this understanding of The Logos? G: Well here’s the kicker, says John. God’s blueprint for creation was not done on the seventh day; God didn’t set up the universe in the beginning and then let it run amok on its own. God hasn't stopped speaking into creation. As we'll read further in chapter 1, God’s conversation with God's self became God’s conversation with us, and God's Logos became flesh and blood and dwelt among us; God’s Living Word invaded our shadowed earthly reality with the light of Bethlehem and Tabor. Do we have questions for God? Jesus, says John in verse 18, is God’s explanation, God’s reasoned argument to us. As Jesus will say in John chapter 14, if we see Jesus, we've seen God. God's Word, God's Logos is, but is not merely, a blueprint or an idea or a story; God, to explain God's self to us, became a living, breathing person, born among us, living with us, dying for us, and going before us on the way to what has been the goal of the plan since before there was time: resurrection unto eternal life. Thanks be to God.
    Thank you, Gordon.
    As we enter the season of Advent, and as we let John’s prologue be one of our guides, what might you need for this season? Where can you aim your curiosity during this season?
    Next week, we’ll talk more about Jesus participating IN creation, but for now, the idea of Jesus as being present BEFORE creation might be important for you.
    Or maybe for you, exploring who Jesus is - what is Jesus origin and identity is the key part of Advent this year. Either because this is all kind of new for you, OR because you’ve been following Jesus for so long that you’ve forgotten how to be curious about Him.
    Does your image of God match what we see in the person of Jesus? Perhaps this advent, you need a correction - you need to let the Word made flesh be what reveals what God is like for you.
    Or, perhaps you need to spend a season contemplating and exploring how the human and the divine are held together by the incarnation.
    I don’t know what you might need.
    But I do know that John’s prologue makes a very good companion as we make our way through this season of waiting and longing. Of preparation. Of expectant hope.
    Our hope is in the Word who was there in the beginning. Who was with God. Who is God.
    Thanks be to God.
    prayer?

      • John 1:1–18NRSVUE

      • John 7NRSVUE

      • John 1:1–2NIV2011

      • Genesis 1:1–2NIV2011

      • John 1:1–2NIV2011

  • This Is Jesus
  • This Is Jesus
Southwest Community Church
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