Full of Grace and Truth

John 1:1-18

February 25, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

There’s something powerful about touch. A 2013 article in Psychology Today put it, “Touch is the first sense we acquire and the secret weapon in many a successful relationship” (https://goo.gl/dcZvJE). The article went on to discuss how babies especially receive messages from the touch of a parent, and how researchers have found that touch even mitigates pain when we are stuck with a needle. So, having someone hold your hand during that shot really does help; it’s not all in your head! We, however, have become a touch-phobic society. We fear spreading germs, or we fear being sued for what has become an ever-enlarging list of “inappropriate” touches. By the time we’re elderly, often the only times we’re touched is when someone gives us medical treatment. I’ve had people in nursing homes and hospitals tell me that very thing. It’s ironic; we know there is a bond, a connection that is made through the power of touch, and yet we remain wary of touch. Or maybe we remain afraid of the connection touch can bring.

It’s not just person-to-person touch that is powerful. For me, touching parts of the past is a profound experience. When Rachel and I were in Egypt in 2012, the one thing I knew I wanted to do was to touch the pyramids, those ancient monuments, those stones that have stood as much history passed by. It was a bit disappointing that literally across the street from the pyramids is a Kentucky Fried Chicken, but it was still a powerful thing to touch those rocks (after getting past the locals who wanted to charge us to do so). When I’m in Israel, I find great meaning in leaning down to touch the pavement stones from the first century, pavement stones that Jesus undoubtedly walked upon during his final journey to the cross. I know in my head that they are just rocks, but there’s still something profound about my hand grazing the place where the savior’s feet once passed. Touch is a profound experience.

So I get it when John, in one of his letters, writes these words: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). John was an eyewitness, and more than that, he touched the Son of God. He touched God, and that thought still amazes him, all these years later. What ought to amaze us is that the same hand that John is talking about, the one who touched the physical Jesus, later wrote the words that we are still studying today (cf. Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 36), this Gospel of John that we are reading through for the season of Lent. So when we read these words, in a way, we are reaching back and touching Jesus as well.

We’re calling this series “Simply Jesus,” because out of the four Gospels, John more than any other calls us to believe in Jesus. He wants us to get a clear vision of who Jesus was and is. Last week, we talked about John himself and how he, late in his life, put pen to parchment and labeled himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” He did that, you remember, as a reminder that we all can be that disciple; that we all are those loved by Jesus. This morning, then, we want to start through the Gospel of John in earnest, and consider in particular what is typically called the “prologue.” John doesn’t start the story like most people would or like the other Gospels do. Remember, he’s had his entire life up to this point to reflect upon and preach about all that Jesus meant, and he’s come to some conclusions that he wants to use to frame the story of Jesus. So John begins, not with Jesus’ birth, but at the very beginning, at creation. In words that reflect Genesis 1, John begins his Gospel with these famous words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1).

The word for “Word” is logos, from which we get our English word “logic.” Now, John is probably writing his Gospel in the city of Ephesus, a “city of professional teachers” (Card 35). It was an intellectual city in John’s time (and later the site of a famous library). Ephesus had a hometown hero who was a philosopher. Heraclitus had developed a whole school of thinking around the idea of the logos. In a world that often seemed chaotic and constantly changing (sound familiar?), Heraclitus said the world was not, in fact, as chaotic as we think it is. It is all under control of the logos, a principle of order that we just aren’t able to determine or see from our limited viewpoint. It was reason and logic that controlled the world and kept things together. Logos, for Heraclitus, was not quite God, but more an idea of a nameless, faceless power. One author puts it this way: “Logos is the power which puts sense into the world, the power which makes the world an order instead of a chaos, the power which set the world going and keeps it going in perfect order” (Barclay, The Gospel of John, Volume 1, pg. 35). John undoubtedly understands all this, having lived and pastored in Ephesus for some time, and in some ways he’s using Paul’s strategy (from Acts 17) of taking a cultural idea and helping the readers or listeners draw connections from what they already know to what they need to know. It is a way of helping others see how any truth out there is really God’s truth. I have a friend who uses movies in the same way today. He never goes to a movie without asking those with him, “How does this relate to Christian truth?” So John is using the idea they are already familiar with—logos—and giving it new meaning.

Because John is not intending to say Jesus is that Greek logos. Without question, in John’s mind, he wants to help them understand the Hebrew idea of “word.” That word is debar, and it means both “word” and “deed” (Card 31). In the Old Testament—which was all of the Bible that both John and Jesus had, of course—“word” and “deed” are intricately connected, especially when it comes to God. What God says, he does. Remember the first creation story? Over and over again, we hear, “God said…and it was so.” I can’t ever read that creation story without remembering the time we were trying to memorize the whole poem in 5th & 6th grade Sunday School class at Rossville Church. We each had our part, and I don’t remember what my part was, but a friend of mine had the “let there be light” part. She couldn’t get the order of the words right, so her dad told her just to say, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and sure enough, there was.” Well, that may not be the exact right words, but it is true. God spoke, and it happened. Jesus is that word. He is the logos through whom everything came into being. He is the Word of God who brings life (1:4). 

And that takes me down a brief rabbit trail, because we often get confused as to what and who is the Word of God, the logos. John is very clear: the Word of God is Jesus Christ. But we often refer to our Bibles as “the word of God.” Are both statements true? Well, yes, to a point. Every time I read Scripture from the pulpit, you hear me say something like, “The word of God for the people of God.” And often you respond with something like, “Thanks be to God,” because we are grateful for this Scripture. But the Bible is not what we worship. History has plenty of examples of what happens when we worship the Bible rather than the one the Bible points us to. The words of the Bible point us to the one who is the Word. When we read this text, when I preach from this text, when we read it in our daily devotions, we’re always looking for the ways in which the words here point us to Jesus—which ought to help us not get hung up on one translation or another, because honestly no translation is perfect. I have twenty different translations in my office and none of them are perfect. Personally, I like to check various ways words have been translated and even then, sometimes I don’t agree with any of them! The Holy Spirit, though, has been wonderfully present in making sure the text has been faithfully transmitted from one generation to the next; if we learned nothing else from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we learned that. We can trust the Bible, but we don’t worship it. The pages of this book are vital, absolutely vital, in helping us know Jesus, but it is still Jesus who is the Word of God (cf. Disciple 1 Teacher Helps, Second Edition, pg. 12). John is very clear on that.

But then John pushes the envelope even more here when he makes this startling statement: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (1:14). It’s a verse we’re very familiar with; we hear it read at least every Christmas Eve. What we don’t realize is how radical, how crazy an idea this would have been to those first readers in Ephesus. You see, “flesh” was not considered a desirable goal in Greek thought. It’s the same word Paul uses in his letters when he’s talking about the weakness and sinfulness of human nature; the word in Greek is sarx, it even sounds undesireable, doesn’t it? The one thing the Greek mind would never have imagined a god would want to do was to take on a human body, to be clothed in flesh. “To a Greek this was the impossible thing” (Barclay 64-65). There was a whole school of Christian thought that developed out of this idea, and it became known as Docetism, from a Greek word that means “to seem.” They believed Jesus only seemed to be in flesh. In reality, it was all a big hoax, they said, because no god would take on flesh. No god would dirty himself with flesh and bone, blood and sinew, and all the sinfulness that goes with that. It’s too dirty, too unthinkable. Yet, John dares to proclaim that this is exactly what Jesus did. He took on flesh, just like you and me, and came to live among us. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases this verse, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (1:14, MSG). I love that! Paul says the Word “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6). And John puts it even more forcefully in one of his letters: “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist…” (1 John 4:2-3). The Word, the eternal creating Word, became flesh. He became like you and me. And he moved in next door.

So what was he like? I mean, when you have new people move into your neighborhood, you want to know what they are like, what you’re getting, right? In most neighborhoods, the word spreads quickly about what has been heard. I wonder what word got out about Cathy and I when we moved into our house, because I’m sure there were conversations. You want to make sure your neighborhood isn’t going to significantly change, right? So what is this Word like, since he’s moved into our neighborhood? John tells us right away. He is “full of grace and truth” (1:14). These are two powerful words, so powerful that I want to spend the rest of our time sort of pondering what they mean and how they impact our lives. What does it mean that this new neighbor, this Word, is “full” of grace and truth?

Jesus is full of grace. Grace is something we don’t get, we don’t understand well in the world we live in today, mainly because it is in such short supply. The word translated as “grace” is charitos, which is the root of our word “charismatic.” Someone who is “charismatic” is thought of as attractive or having qualities that draw others to them. They are likable, they are fun, they are often the center of attention. Some speakers or leaders are said to be “charismatic.” At its root, though, that word has less to do with our ability to draw a crowd and more to do with having gifts (whether of communication or leadership or whatever) that they didn’t really earn. “Grace” has the sense of having something we did not and could not earn or achieve for ourselves (Barclay 66). Behind John’s use of the word is the Old Testament word that I’ve shared with you before: hesed. It is untranslatable directly from Hebrew to English, and the best translation is not a single word but a phrase: when the one who owes you nothing gives you everything (Card 36). Sometimes it’s translated as “love” and sometimes as “mercy.” The translators of the King James Version had to create a new word to try to help us understand it: “lovingkindness.”

Those are fine words, but what does it mean to receive something we don’t deserve? That’s where we get hung up, because we have been taught that we have to earn everything we get. We work, we get a paycheck. We pay our dues and work harder, we earn respect or a promotion. We do our homework, we earn good grades. We do the exercise and diet, we lose weight (or we hope to). We follow the rehab program, we get stronger. We do, we earn; we don’t do, we don’t earn. That’s how the world works. But that’s not how God works. Wouldn’t it be easier, we think, if we could just have a list of obligations we had to fulfill to get God’s approval? Check it off, get it done, know that you’re “in.” But that’s not how God works, and do you know why? Because there’s never enough “good” we can do to balance out the “bad” of our sin. The book of Romans puts it this way: “There is no one righteous, not even one…All have turned away…there is no one who does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10-12). So what God chose to do instead was to offer grace. The Word came “full of grace”—literally “complete.” The bucket is full to overflowing. You could not get another ounce of grace inside him. Jesus is full of unmerited favor. His very nature is to give us good things, things we don’t deserve. His very nature is to love us even when we are at our most unloveable. Lately, one of the books I’ve been reading is a biography of John Newton, the author of one of the world’s most famous hymns. Newton, in his early life, was a slave trader and committed some heinous acts toward Africans. Even after his conversion to the Christian faith, Newton continued to captain slave ships, though he tended to treat them more humanely than others (if such a thing is possible). Yet, slowly, he came to the realization that what he had been taught and believed all of his life, that the slaves were less than human, was not true, and that slave trading was anti-Christian. Did God love John Newton less while he was figuring this out, while he was growing in his faith? Did God love John Newton less when he was committing terrible acts? No, not at all. He waited patiently, pouring out grace on John Newton until Newton turned around and responded in love toward Jesus. It was that realization that caused Newton to then write these well-loved words:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind but now I see.

Grace, mercy, love—Jesus is full of grace and never runs out. The miracle is that when he pours out grace on me, he still has grace for you and for you and for you. His is a never-ending supply. He gives us what we don’t deserve; he is full of grace.

And, John says, Jesus was full of truth. This is a word we will see again and again as we read John’s Gospel (cf. Barclay 66). Later on in the Gospel, we will hear Jesus say that he is the truth (John 14:6). When we think about truth, we tend to think about a list of facts. We think of truth as something that is in short supply these days, because we live in a world where everyone believes they can have their own personal truth. Social media has given everyone a voice, and everyone therefore believes that their opinion is truth. We think of truth as something subjective today, a slippery concept that is constantly being redefined. But John doesn’t intend to point to any of those sorts of definitions when he says the Word was and is full of truth. Rather, what he wants us to see is that truth is now not a concept or a list of facts or even an opinion. Truth is a person. From the moment of Jesus’ arrival, knowing the truth is not about memorizing a list of laws or even reading a book. Knowing the truth is following a person—a living, breathing, bleeding, dying and rising again person. Knowing the truth doesn’t mean we have to have all the answers; knowing the truth means we have to know Jesus (cf. Card 36).

And so this Truth points us to God. When Jesus says, “I am the…truth,” he’s telling us that he did not come to talk to us about God. He came to show us what God is like. When Jesus says, “The truth will set you free” (8:32), he wants us to see how the truth of Jesus triumphs over everything with which the world tries to hold us captive. For instance, one of the great fears this world holds over us is the fear of death. It holds us all captive, because we know it’s coming to us eventually should the Lord tarry. This past week, though, we once again saw a marvelous example of how Jesus, the truth, overcomes that fear and sets us free. I was in cardiac rehab on Wednesday morning when the breaking news came on the television that Billy Graham had died at the age of 99. What a marvelous life Rev. Graham lived, and my mind immediately went back to the few times I had the chance to hear him speak live. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said in those messages (after all, people remember songs a lot longer than sermons, yet we keep preaching sermons), but I could tell you that every time, Billy Graham pointed to Jesus as the truth. Because of that truth, Billy Graham had no fear in facing death. He constantly preached about the hope of heaven, and even near the end of his life, he reminded people, “My home is in Heaven. I’m just traveling through this world.” The truth of the Gospel, the truth that is in Jesus, gave him peace—and I’ve seen that same truth transform so many people in similar situations. It’s always a privilege, a high and holy calling, to be able to stand in the face of death and proclaim the hope of the resurrection: that there is a place where there is no more death or crying or pain (cf. Revelation 21:4). We can be set free from the fear that the world holds over us when we embrace the truth. And Jesus was full of truth.

But that truth has another side as well. That truth will also not leave us alone when we’re trying to convince ourselves that the sin we want to do is okay. Truth reveals our brokenness. Jesus as the truth is like a mirror that we hold our lives up to, and in the reflection we see the ways in which our lives fail to live up to God’s standard. But we know, deep down in our gut, that giving ourselves to the truth also will help us become more and more the way we were meant to be. One place this was clearly evident was in South Africa in the years following the fall of apartheid. Some of you remember when South Africa was ruled by a white minority over a black majority. Terrible atrocities were committed, on both sides, especially as that system of government came to an end. Most of the world expected a bloody revolution to take place, but instead the leadership of that country pulled from its deep Christian roots and, miraculously, had a peaceful transfer of power. The way this was accomplished was by establishing what they called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under the leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu. If former government officials would come forward to tell the truth about their misdeeds and ask for forgiveness, it would be granted. It seems beyond belief, and yet history testifies that truth mixed with the grace of forgiveness won out in that nation (Colson, The Faith, pg. 138). Truth holds us accountable. Truth calls us to be more than we are. Truth calls us to repent of our sin and live God’s way. Jesus is full of truth.

Without truth, grace would become mere sentimentality. Without grace, truth would become legalism. We often will offer one or the other, or small bits and pieces of both, but Jesus stands in stark contrast to the way we normally live because he was full—full to the brim—of both grace and truth. He was fully God and fully human. He was full of grace and full of truth. I can’t explain it completely how those seemingly contradictory things could be; I just know they are because I have experienced both. There have been times where I have done some stupid stuff, things I should have known better not to do, and Jesus has given me grace. And there have been times when, despite my desire to just gloss over something, I have been led to stand up for truth. But I’m not perfect, and I don’t always get it right, which is why I have to trust Jesus that his grace and truth, held in perfect balance, will prevail.

So as we continue on into John, we’re beginning to put together the puzzle pieces that give us a picture of Jesus. John has given us a big picture—the one on the “top of the puzzle box”—in this first chapter, but he’s also given us words to look for as we continue into the story of Jesus. Grace. Truth. Life. As followers of Jesus, then, as disciples of the Word, what we say, how we live, and the way we treat others matters. We must be people who are unafraid to stand up for what is true, especially in a world where truth is often seen as relative or only what can fit into 240 characters. We must speak truth, but we must also be people of grace, speaking and living and standing up for what is right in a spirit of love. I’m encouraged and challenged by yet another quote from Billy Graham: “It is the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, God’s job to judge and my job to love.” How does grace and truth impact the way we interact with the person who checks out our groceries, the family member who makes a mistake, the addict who comes back to you and asks for forgiveness? How do we live out grace and truth in our online interactions? Is that post you’re preparing to submit done in the spirit of grace and truth, not just one or the other? What about the ways we treat those who have hurt us or spoken falsehoods about us? Or the co-workers who abuse us behind our backs (or maybe not behind our backs)? Can we live in grace and truth then? In a world where abuse seems rampant, where racism and anger and violence continue to rear their ugly heads, where having a civil conversation seems an impossibility and where the news can easily depress us, how will we live as followers of Jesus? How will we demonstrate and live out grace and truth? You see, grace and truth must inform and envelop every part of our lives, every second of our days—and if we are followers of the Word made flesh, we should be people who are becoming more like him in every encounter. He is the truth who has given us grace; we can do no less to and for those around us. Hear the call of John’s prologue: stand for the truth and live as ambassadors of grace.