“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
John 1:1

John is my favourite Gospel. I love the way he writes. He gives us details, explains things and provides useful background information before launching into the story. This is, after all, the man who regularly refers to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and thought it important that future generations knew that when he and Peter ran to Jesus’ empty tomb, John got there first. I appreciate that sort of attention to detail. John certainly gives us some background before beginning his account of Jesus.

He doesn’t start with an angel visiting Mary, a stable, shepherds or wise men following a star. John apparently decides that if we’re going to understand who Jesus is, we need to go back considerably further than Bethlehem.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

Not the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life. Not the beginning of humanity. The beginning.

“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

Before Bethlehem, before Abraham, before Adam took a breath, before there was an earth beneath our feet or a star in the sky, there was the Word. And the Word was God.

Then John introduces another John. This one is John the Baptist, and I love that even here the Gospel writer is careful to tell us exactly what his role is. John the Baptist isn’t the light. He is there to bear witness to the light, to point people towards it. There’s something rather lovely in that distinction. His purpose isn’t to make people look at him; it is to help them recognise Jesus.

It made me think about what it means when Jesus tells us that we are the light of the world. I don’t think that means I have to somehow manufacture light of my own. Christ is the light, and if Christ dwells in us, perhaps our job is simply to let some of that light become visible in the way we live and love. We don’t need to be the source. We just need to stop getting in the way of it.

Then, fourteen verses in, having taken us back beyond human history to the beginning of everything, John brings everything suddenly very close:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

The God through whom everything was made became one of us.

I think sometimes I forget just how extraordinary Christianity actually is. We hear these words so often that perhaps we stop being surprised by them. God didn’t simply send instructions or remain somewhere safely distant from the complicated business of being human, shouting advice from heaven. He came here. He became one of us and lived among us.

Jesus knew what it was to be hungry and tired. He knew friendship and laughter, rejection and grief. He knew what it was to be misunderstood. He wept. He loved. He touched people others wouldn’t touch and sat at tables with people others wouldn’t sit beside. Christianity doesn’t show us a God who merely observes what it is to be human; it gives us a God who chose to enter fully into it.

And tucked into John’s extraordinary introduction is one of my favourite descriptions of what Jesus brings into the world:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

I think the wording matters. John doesn’t tell us there won’t be darkness. There quite obviously is. We see enough of it in the world, and most of us will encounter some of it in our own lives. Faith doesn’t magically prevent painful things from happening. Prayers don’t always produce the answer we wanted, and sometimes God can feel considerably further away than we would like.

The promise isn’t that darkness won’t exist. It’s that darkness doesn’t get the final word.

And the light John is talking about isn’t an abstract idea about positivity or looking on the bright side. The light is Jesus. The same Word who was there in the beginning, through whom everything was made, stepped directly into the darkness and lived among us.

I find something enormously comforting in that. When life is difficult, we aren’t praying to a God who has watched human suffering from a comfortable distance. We are praying to Jesus, who entered fully into the mess, beauty, pain and joy of human existence. He knows what it is to love, to grieve, to hurt and to be hurt. God came near enough to know.

John starts his Gospel somewhere beyond time itself and, in fourteen verses, brings us all the way to a human being living among us.

From the creator of everything to flesh and blood. From the beginning of everything, into our world.

And the light shines in the darkness.

Two thousand years later, it still hasn’t been overcome.

-Laura