John 1:(1-9), 10-18 Commentary

As we come to the first Sunday of 2021, most of us are only too glad to have left 2020 behind.  If on New Year’s Eve a year ago we toasted the happy arrival of a new year, this past week we probably did less of a toast to welcome 2021 and offered up instead a bit of a groan as an ugly, tragic, troubling year finally ended.  But when the pandemic began in earnest in February and March around the world, who would have guessed that many of us still would not be inside a church sanctuary for the first services of 2021?  If any of us thought the pandemic would last only weeks or a couple months, we were sorely wrong.  Lately the death toll in a place like the United States has been staggeringly enough at all time highs.

Maybe then this year the Lectionary text from John 1 that often gets assigned for the Second Sunday after Christmas is particularly apt and maybe in its own way hopeful.  Because a lot of the time this past year we maybe had a hard time discerning the presence of Christ in our lives and in our world.  In the midst of so much death, so much sorrow, so much anger and division, where is Jesus to be found?  Why can’t we see him as large and plain and unmistakable to our eyes of faith?

But perhaps John 1 reminds us that it has always been so but Christ is present even so.  After all, the first words of the Gospel text in this lection tell us that Jesus came to that which was his own, but his own did NOT receive him.  The long-awaited One was there, and people just missed him.

But the text of John 1:10 confronts us, forcing us to ask ourselves, “Yes, perhaps we saw Jesus but did we recognize him?  Did we receive him?  Did we take his incarnation into our time and space seriously enough to realize that this changes everything?  Everything!”

Probably not.

The truth is, we like the Jesus in the manger because he can’t say anything yet.  We can project onto him anything we want.  Maybe that is why in the tradition of the church we do such a rapid fast-forward to Epiphany and soon to the baptism of Jesus and the launch of the very public ministry we will consider in the weeks between Epiphany and the start of Lent.  Maybe the church has long recognized that wonderful though the incarnation is, the real truth of Jesus comes when he opens his mouth to teach and preach, when we sets himself down at the table of the tax collectors and prostitutes, when he tells us to love everyone and to forgive even our most ardent enemies.

That’s the real Jesus who comes to us.  Will we receive him?  Will we accept the blessing of the divine grace that allows us to see him aright?  Or will we continue to find John 1:10 an indictment that makes us blush?

It is a vital point because when you move on a half-dozen verses in John 1, you discover what this Child really brings (and it turns out to be the #1 thing we all need):  Grace.

He is full of Grace.

When some years ago I did a word study on grace as part of a book project I was working on, I discovered what most of us already know intuitively: the word charis or “grace” does not crop up much in the four gospels.  Despite the hugeness of “salvation by grace alone” for all of us who stand in some stream or another of the Reformation river, the word “grace” is restricted in the New Testament to mostly the writings of Paul.  You can read “grace” once in a blue moon in the gospels (and then in non-salvific contexts sometimes, as in Luke 2 when the young boy Jesus is described as having grown up with wisdom and grace).  But mostly if it’s grace you’re looking for, in the case of the gospels you’ll have to locate it in the actions and demeanor of Jesus, not in the text on the page.

But not in John 1.  Here grace is as bubbly and as effervescent as a freshly poured glass of champagne.  It sparkles.  It pops  It delights.  Grace clings to the Word of God, to the Word made flesh.  It characterizes him.  It is his essence.

Along with Truth, this Grace defines Jesus’ presence on the earth: he’s the only One with the ability to know exactly what is right and what is wrong with the way life typically goes on Planet Earth and he is—blessedly enough—simultaneously the only One with the Grace sufficient to deal with all the garbage of that normal way of life (which is, in the end, anything but “normal” in God’s sight).

All of this is Good News.  This is all Gospel at its purest and finest.  And it reaches something of a crescendo in verse 16 when we are told that from the fullness of all the Grace this Word made flesh has, we in turn have received “grace upon grace.”  We get Grace-squared, Grace-cubed, Grace raised to a power of 10.  It builds up and up in our lives, and how we need that assurance.  Paul will later say that God’s grace always hyper-abounds to meet the sinful challenges we encounter in our lives.  God knows what we know (and what we can admit if only we’re honest with ourselves and with one another): in this life and for this time yet, we’re never finished with our need for grace.

The Good News is that neither is God in Christ ever finished with doling it out.  Grace is where we live.  Grace is the ocean in which we swim.  Grace is the atmosphere we breathe.

Don’t let Bible translations like the NIV make you miss this with its weak rendering of our having received “one blessing after the next.”  That’s not what John said!  That’s not what Jesus gives!  Yes, we do receive a blessing but it’s the blessing of Grace, Grace, Grace.  The blessing of Grace² of Grace¹⁰ of a blessing that won’t quit, that cannot be derailed by sin and evil, and that will most surely carry us into the kingdom of our Father at the end of the cosmic day.

The first Sunday of the New Year is often a time to feel regrets for goals not achieved in the year gone by and a time to set goals and resolutions for the year to come.  Probably, though, with all the disruptions and cancellations of 2020 due to the pandemic, that is not the way we feel on this first Sunday of a new year.  For now most of us share the same goal for 2021: getting back to some semblance of normal, trying to piece back together lives shattered by job losses and family losses and so much more sadness.

We looked for Jesus in 2020 and often could not see him.  But he’s been here all along, hidden in our midst.  And he is here to remind us that for this coming year, Grace is still the most important thing in the Gospel and our finest source, therefore, of hope.

Textual Points

In John 1:5 we are told the light shines in the darkness but that the darkness has not . . . and here the translations diverge.  The Greek verb is katalambano which mostly means “to seize” or to nab, capture, overtake (often with hostile intentions according to the Greek dictionary.  Some translations in the past, and more recently also the NRSV, have opted for “but the darkness has not overcome it” but the NIV has opted for “has not understood it.”  Calvin Theological Seminary Professor of New Testament Emeritus Dean Deppe provides the following information: There are five possibilities:

1) to grasp or comprehend intellectually: KJV, NKJV, NASB, NIV a) Cyril Alex; Latin tradition b) 3:19 not perceive the light brought by Jesus c) parallel to v. 10,11 -but if “understand” you’d probably expect the present tense and in John 1:5 it is aorist.

2) to welcome, receive, accept a) match paralambano in v. 11 b) Aramaic: qablâ (darkness) and qabble|h (receive it) so word play

3) to overtake, overcome (grasp in a hostile sense) RSV, NRSV, NJB a) Origin, majority of Greek fathers, Schlatter, Westcott, Brown b) in the only other use in Jn. 12:35 c) dualistic opposition between light and darkness demands this verb d) Wis. 7:29-30 compares wisdom to light that the darkness cannot supplant e) fits with Gnosticism and sectarian Judaism that the darkness is trying to completely extinguish the light (Acts Thomas 130) against: destroys parallelism with 10c and 11b (but different stanza)

4) to master, absorb: BAGD: Moffatt -try to capture both understand and overcome -playing with both meanings (Barrett, Carson)

5) Deliberate ambiguity (Silva, Biblical Words, 149-150)

I think we must first examine how an author employs the term in other passages.  Because the other use in Jn. 12:35 demands overcome (“before darkness overtakes you”), I believe that must be the meaning here as well.

However one translates this, the “darkness” itself is not spelled out by John.  What darkness?  Whose darkness?  It’s curious that John does not spell it out, but perhaps this reflects no more than the fact that John didn’t feel the need to articulate more fully what darkness he meant—there is so much darkness and fallenness and hurt in this broken world that it is too obvious to get very specific.  We know what the darkness is.  We’ve all felt it, lived in it, passed through particularly dark valleys.  The light shines in the darkness.”  That’s good news in John 1:5 because it’s in the dark that we yearn for that light most of all.

Illustration Idea

Marilynne Robinson loves lawn sprinklers.  If you read her Pulitzer-prize winning novel, Gilead, then you know that she is always on the lookout for the glory that lurks in the everyday.  Along those lines, she thinks that the person who invented the garden sprinkler did something far lovelier than just provide a handy way to water grass.  Because, you see, sprinklers expose water droplets to sunlight, and in that shimmering moment, you see each drop not as the stuff you use to do the dishes or mop the kitchen floor.

No, you see that each drop is really a jewel, a mini-cathedral, as the light refracts to expose the dazzling rainbow that surrounds us always.  The essence of light and water is revealed in the selfsame moment, and it reminds us of the glory that engulfs us daily, though we mostly miss it.  “We have seen his glory,” the evangelist John wrote.  But he also wrote that the glory of that One and Only sent from the Father often is missed.  “He came to that which was his own and his own received him not.”

Glory surrounds us, John believed and Marilynne Robinson claims.  But we miss it.  We miss it again and again.