What’s in a word?

I love words. Not only are some of them inherently beautiful, but I’m fascinated by the way we create sounds that contain meanings.

Sure, the Book of Proverbs does warn that “when words are many, sin is not absent”, but it balances the assertion by also pointing out that “a word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver” which, although probably bad for the teeth, presumably represents something good.

I guess my love of words might explain why John’s prologue is my favourite of all the readings that frequently appear in carol services. In my previous church (a phrase no pastor should use too often!) it was the tradition that the minister read the opening verses of John’s Gospel as the final reading in the carol service and the words were so precious to me that I would find myself feeling uncharacteristically nervous in the seconds before I stood to read it.

As John Piper points out, here in just the first three verses we have the culmination and distillation of what it took John the Apostle a whole three years to come to understand. Here we find the Evangelist identifying Jesus as God’s decisive and definitive Word to the world. In His arrival on this enemy occupied planet, in His teaching, in His death, and by His resurrection He embodies and says all that needs to be said.

Preachers, particularly those from our Evangelical tradition, are known for their propensity to reduce text to alliterative points – all the better, for some reason I’ve never fathomed, if there are three of them – and so, true to my kind, my thoughts on John’s opening statement come in the form of the clichéd three alliterative points: when, who, and why.

Matthew, in his Gospel, begins by taking us back in genealogical form to Abraham, Luke goes further back to Adam while making the claim that Jesus is the Son of God, Mark skips the first 30 years of Jesus’ life and dives straight in with John the Baptist, but John uniquely takes us back to before time was, before all things, and states in echo of the Bible’s first words that “In the beginning was the Word.” Sure, He entered time and space at the Incarnation, but He preceded the one and is beyond the other.

But not only was He hanging out with God in eternity past, John immediately builds on the statement to identify Him as God. He didn’t somehow assume God-status at some arbitrary point in time at or after His birth, John wants us to know beyond any possible doubt that He Himself is God. “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” Not only is Jesus the perfect image of God, Jesus is Himself in his very essence God. From all eternity He has possessed the fullness of deity.

And so having spoken of the when and the who, John turns our attention to the why. “In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” Life (real life, not some pale, insipid imitation) is a theme that John will return to over and over again in his Gospel. “I tell you the truth”, John recalls Jesus as saying (John 5v24) “whoever hears my word and believes him who has sent me has eternal life”, while he also records Jesus claiming that if we reject Him we won’t have life (John 5v40), along with promises of “life in all its fulness” (John 10v10) and the assurance that He gives His sheep “eternal life” (John 10v28).

T.S. Eliot once said that “poetry is language at its most distilled and powerful”. John’s prologue isn’t, strictly speaking, poetry, but it is inarguably poetic and beautiful, and it answers the oft-quoted question. “What’s in a word?” it answers, loud and clear: God is.