Setting # 4.Carrying from my last post, Seeing Queen Elizabeth in different settings, the informal as well as in splendour and majesty, very royal, leads me to think of another very surprising scene. Christmas time reminds us of Someone more special than Queen Elizabeth II. Thirty years down his road of life he was unrecognised. We see him down by the River Jordan. Yes, I have been to Israel, three times. No, I didn’t see anyone extraordinary looking ordinary in an ordinary setting, but someone did. The historical event has been recorded in the Gospels. It’s an amazing story really, it affects us all. A person called John the Baptist was somewhere down by the Jordan declaring himself to be “the voice of one calling in the desert, ‘ Make straight the way for the Lord‘” (John 1:23). He was quoting a prediction from Isaiah 40:3.He was calling for the people of his nation to repent of their sins and be baptised and to prepare for the coming Messiah. Among the people coming down to him to be baptised was an ordinary looking man about 30 years of age. No one recognised who he was. In fact, John the Baptist had to point him out to the crowds: He is the ‘Lamb who takes away the sin of the world‘ (John 1:29). In verse 34 he declared, “I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.” But despite that, John the Apostle records that sad statement in John 1:11, “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”
He had no entourage to accompany him on the equivalent of today’s first class travel. He was without material means and property-less with “no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). How could John put it across to the people of his day, that the Creator of the Universe had actually shared life here with fallen human beings - even roughing it with fishermen in their boats?
Beside ourselves at Christmas time, I wonder if John the Apostle had thought that too many, including himself, had not appreciated the majesty and greatness of the Person who had made such a humble entry into our world? It says in John 1:10, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him.” How could John reveal to the people of his time, and to us down in our time, what he had seen of the greatness of Jesus? He found it in one word: it is repeated three times in the introduction to his Gospel, in John 1:1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
The Greek for ‘Word’, is Logos. Logos, was known to both Jew and Greek. For the Jews, the Old Testament was a record of God’s promises and acts in history. In Psalm 33:6 we are told, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.” In Psalm 33:9 it says that God “spoke and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm.”
Sceptics in our modern day may look for natural explanations for how life came to be, but the Bible says it was God’s word, or Logos, who spoke the world into being. Unlike the belief of the materialist of our day, it is mind and intelligence that produced matter and not matter that produced mind and intelligence. That is the Christian view. For the Greek, Logos, was the impersonal reason behind the universe. For John the person behind the universe is the person of Jesus (John 1:3, 10), who became the Word of God on earth. The Centurion recognised that power and authority when he said to Jesus, “Just say the word, and my servant will be healed“(Matt 8:8-13).
So we can see why John chose the idea of Logos to describe Jesus, it was a word that was full of meaning to the world of his day, to both Jew and Greek. Jesus was the Logos, the creative power of God who came into this world. He was the life of the World, so he could say to his disciples in John 14: 6, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” and again in John 6:63, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life” and that life is eternal (John 3:16). And life eternal is coming to know “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he sent” (John 17:3).
The miracles that John records in His Gospel are chosen to demonstrate the power of His word. When Jesus spoke, it happened! Especially when speaking those words to a man who had been dead and entombed four days (John 11:39), “Lazarus, come out” (John 11:43). That was his crowning miracle that should have been evidence of who Jesus was. In his great condescension Jesus came to be one with us, joining us in a very informal way, without the splendour or the grandeur that would be rightfully his (John 17:5). If anything, that is the meaning of Christmas. He came to show us what God is like, how he behaves towards us - anyone who had seen Jesus had seen the Father (John 14:9).
We find towards the end of the Gospel the story of Thomas (John 20:24-31). Just as Thomas made his discovery and confession, we too have to make our own discovery of Jesus and make our own personal confession, “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28). His first coming was not to be the last (John 14:1-3), he is to return - there is another setting to come - a much grander and awesome setting at which we are all present - from ages past to the time of his Second Advent - next time.
