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

George Beasley-Murray describes this second half of the gospel of John’s prologue as an echo of the Exodus narrative, particularly verses 14-18.

As the Israelites made their exodus from slavery in Egypt by the salvific passover work of God through the prophet Moses, they entered the wilderness full of unknown and were challenged to come to know their saving God. Through the cloud and the pillar of fire, through Moses and the law given at Mount Sinai, through filling the tent of meeting at the center of their camp with glory and presence, through forty years of testing and growing the faith of the people, Yahweh made himself known to them as a God who could be trusted to lead and deliver them into the Promised Land. God showed God’s heart to and for them.

Similar to how John the Baptist compares himself to Jesus, how much more so has all of this come to pass in the monogenēs, literally the “one and only of his kind,” Jesus Christ. The one and only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known—has exegeted Yahweh for the world.

Jesus is glory in the flesh. Jesus is glory alive and living among us—not just inanimate forms like a cloud or pillar of fire or surrounded by a tent, but glory enfleshed. And Jesus’s glory is expressed as grace and truth.

In fact, he’s full of the stuff—to the point that he can hold no more, implying (at least to me anyway) that it’s now spilling out of him all over the world. Or as John describes it, “From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” Like the manna that fell each morning, but more and greater is the rippling and reverberating grace upon grace that Jesus unleashes on the world.

Various festivals like Passover and the Feast of the Tabernacles were meant to remind the Israelites of what they knew to be true: that they had received salvation by God’s hand. Now, it’s experiences of grace that are meant to root us in knowledge and faith of God.

Grace and truth, not law, is what fills Jesus Christ, the only Son. Whereas we were given the law through Moses to help us understand what it means to live as God’s people, Jesus’s fullness takes it one step further, revealing what is truly possible for a life handed over to God’s glory. Because of the incarnation, we have a different kind of measuring stick than we did before, a different way of orienting ourselves, a different way of having our faith be shown in what we do.

Over and over in a myriad of ways, the New Testament encourages us not to put on the law, but to put on the fullness of Christ Jesus. One of the overflowing graces of Jesus’s life among us is that the law no longer condemns us and that God’s grace and truth fills us through God’s Spirit. Yes, the law might be a help us as we consider a life lived in witness to God’s glory, but only insofar as it draws us closer to Jesus Christ so that from the heart of Christ we will be drawn up into unity with the Father.

Though the law was given to us through Moses, it became something that, at best, we tried to keep on our own strength, and at worst, completed disregarded. But the fullness of God in Jesus Christ is something we receive by his Spirit and continuously experience as an outpouring of grace and truth from the Father’s heart.

This is the work of being born of God through faith. By receiving and then believing in his name and all that it entails, we receive the fullness of grace and truth which empowers us to become co-heirs of God. Or as John describes it, the children of God.

And isn’t that the greatest act of grace and truth of all? That the “one and only Son” shares his status with all of us, making us the children of God. Since we had spent so much time rejecting the things of God, including our own identity, Jesus came and pitched his tent among us so that we would know this truth as the grace that it is.

Therefore, as God’s dearly beloved, let us clothe ourselves with Jesus’s grace and truth. Let us receive him as his glory surrounds us as grace and truth. Let us testify to the graces upon graces that God has bestowed on our lives, and let us rest in knowing the Father’s heart for us. Amen.

Textual Point

Also according to George Beasley-Murray’s research, believing in the name of Jesus Christ is a Johannine concept, appearing in a few places in the Gospel, and then again in 1 John. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Jesus’s name, or the name of the Lord, is tied to God’s power and purposes.

Illustration Idea

You’ve likely seen a version of this meme before. When I think of the glory of Jesus Christ in comparison to any sense of glory that can be associated with the law, I imagine something as contrasting as this. In Christ the fullness is impossible to deny—especially to the caricature that we can turn the law into in our disregard for God’s grace and truth.