A New Creation Story: A Reflection on John 1.1-18

This past Summer in our study of Genesis 1-11, we saw how the Old Testament contains several different creation stories (Comparison of Creation Texts). The best-known stories, of God’s speaking the universe into existence over six days in Genesis 1 and the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, appear to be relatively late developments and fit well into the cultural milieu of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. But there are also texts that reflect earlier, Western Semitic, mythological imagery: Psalm 74.12-17, where God is a portrayed as a weather deity battling primordial monsters into submission; Psalm 104, which speaks of God rebuking the monsters and caring for creation; and Job 26, in which God stretches, binds, covers, and fences in the primordial elements through his power. The point is that creation was reimagined in different generations and cultural moments to make different points about who God is. In the context of Israel being one of many small, independent, closely related, rival kingdoms, it was a matter of ‘My God is more powerful than your God’; in the context of a multinational empire and the added philosophical reflection of the Wisdom tradition, it was an insistence that the world was not created by petty, capricious, and violent gods, but by the intentional act of a sovereign and loving God. But even these don’t exhaust the creation stories contained in our Scriptures. There is one more and it’s found in today’s Gospel reading, the prologue of the Gospel according to Saint John. It’s worth reflecting on what it was trying to say, and what that might mean for us today.

This story begins like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.1-5)

Let’s compare this to the opening of Genesis 1:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1.1-4)

Beyond the obvious literary parallel in how the two passages start (”In the beginning …”), we see that John has reworked many of the elements of Genesis 1 — darkness, light, order, and language — to tell his story. But he tells it in a way that spoke to the culture, worldview, and imagery of his time and place, bringing in the language of Greek philosophy. By the first century, the term ‘Word’, or Logos in Greek, had come to refer to the primordial order that lies behind the creation of the cosmos — its grammar or blueprint. In those strands of Judaism that had been influenced by Greek thought, this was connected to the prophetic “Word of the LORD,” something distinct from yet also inseparable from God (for a thought requires a thinker, and a speech requires a speaker).

So, John’s creation story here reiterates the message of the Genesis 1 story, but makes a further affirmation: Yes, the universe was created with intention and care by a loving God, but also its order is inherent to God’s heart and mind and therefore reflects something of God. Just as Genesis 1 was a theological corrective to dominant Babylonian ideas of an accidental creation and anthropomorphic gods, John 1 was a theological corrective to Greek ideas that the material world reflects the absence of the divine. No, it says: the Logos was with God and the Logos was God and all things came into being through the Logos. He continues by saying that no matter how bad things get, and no matter how dark the world may be, that spark of light and life the Logos has placed in the world can never be overcome by darkness and death.

He then says:

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. (John 1.10-13)

In typical John fashion, there’s a mixture here of disclosure and holding back. He’s clear that the light is in the world and has life-changing power to make those he receive it adopted children of God. But buries the lede as to the how. One may rightly wonder here how this true, powerful, life-altering, light was in the world but not known by even its own people. But finally, John comes to his point:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1.14-18)

The Word — the blueprint of the universe and compassionate prophetic message so deeply connected to the very mind and heart of God that we can say that it is not only with God but also is God — has become human, flesh and blood, and lived among us, revealing to us God’s glory, offering us grace and truth, and pouring out blessings from the fullness of the divine life. In this way, he makes God’s heart known to us, and God’s divine life available to us should we embrace it.

So what was John’s message in his creation story? That no matter how dark the world may seem, the light can never be exhausted or extinguished. Light, life, goodness, generosity, grace, love and truth — It’s all there as part of the very fabric of the universe and so can never be undone. What’s more, it has become one of us, the man Jesus of Nazareth, offering humanity a new beginning, the opportunity to be returned to our original factory settings plugged into that light, life, goodness, and all the other good spiritual fruit.

This is as important a message for us today as ever. In these dark times in the world, filled with wars and rumours of war, divisive political discourse, rampant inequality and inequity, and where justice seems increasingly the purview of the wealthy, John’s new creation story reminds us not only that this is not how things were meant to be, but also that God has acted once and for all to help us rectify it — that there is an alternative and it’s right there before our eyes if only we would open our hearts and minds to it. No matter how dark the days, the light is still there and it has not been — and will never be — extinguished. And the Light, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Word that has been made flesh, is inviting us in, to live again as God’s children.

May we all choose to live as children of the Light and doers of the Word.