John 1:10-18 (Continuation of 1:1-18)

John 1:10-13 The world did not know him and his own people did not accept him, but some did

In verse 11, John says the world did not “know” him.  What do you think he means when he says they did not “know” him?

They did not recognize him (they didn’t recognize that God the Word was with them).

They did not understand him – in colloquial terms, they didn’t “get it.”

Jesus was very real and performed miracles.  How can it be that they didn’t recognize him?

How do people in our day fail to recognize or understand Jesus?

Verse 11 says he came to “what was his own” (probably referring to Israel as a nation), and “his own people” (the Jews).  In what sense were they “his own”?

Are there ways that people who are “his own” don’t accept or receive Jesus today?

We could still consider the Jewish people “his own.”  In addition, we could think about people who were baptized, people who grew up in the Church,  but don’t accept Jesus today as still being “his own.”

Verse 12 says that not everyone rejected him.  Some accepted him.  What did he give to them?

What did John say they need to do, to become children of God?

What does it mean, in verse 12, to accept or receive him?

Anyone who is a child must have been born somehow.  Verse 13 says that when they became children of God they were born of God, not by a biological process or human desire or the will of a man.  We will see more in chapter 3 about what it means to be born “of God.”

What does it mean to you, that you are a child of God?  How do you experience that relationship with God?

In what way do you see yourself as having accepted or received Jesus?

What difference does it make in your life that you have accepted/received Jesus?

John 1:14 What did God do?  A mini-summary of the gospel

What did God the Word do, and what does it mean when we say he did those things?

• He became flesh: he became a human.

• He dwelt among us – i.e., he lived with other humans, lived as one of us.  The Greek word, variously translated as “dwelt” or “lived” or “made his dwelling” among us, literally means he encamped or pitched his tent with us.  (This word might have been chosen to invoke the image of God living in a tent with us as he made himself present to the Israelites in a tabernacle/tent in the desert.)

What does John mean when he says, “we saw his glory”?

This could be a reference to seeing the resurrected Jesus; or seeing Jesus crucified, which Jesus considered part of entering into his glory; or seeing Jesus transfigured on the mountain; or seeing Jesus’s miraculous signs, which John says revealed his glory (John 2:11).

In verse 14, where most translations say he is the Father’s “only son,” the actual Greek word is “only-begotten.”  As we know from the “begats” in the Old Testament and the New Testament, when a man is begotten of someone else, it means they have a father-son relationship.  The idea of sonship is embedded in having been begotten, and that may be a key point that John is trying to make by using that word.  Modern translations mostly say “only son” rather than “only-begotten.”  Doing so brings out the relationship that is embedded in the Greek word: John is telling us that Jesus is God’s only Son.

We express this truth in the Nicene Creed.  We say that Jesus Christ is the “Only Begotten Son of God,” echoing John’s reference to the Father’s only-begotten Son (verse 14).  We also say he was “begotten, not made.” He cannot have been made or created because he was present in the beginning (verse 1) and nothing was created except through him (verse 3).  John gives us the pieces that were fleshed out in the words of the Creed.

In terms of your own faith, what stands out to you in verse 14, and what difference does it make in your life?

John 1:15-18 Jesus brought grace and truth and revealed the Father

John now makes it clear that when he says the Word is God and became human, the human he is talking about is Jesus Christ, who is the only Son of God.

Looking at verse 15, what did John the Baptist say about Jesus?

What does he mean when he says that Jesus existed before him, given that John was born months earlier that Jesus (Luke 1:36)?

Looking at verse 16, when John says that we received from his fullness, what does that mean?  What have we received?

The last phrase in verse 16 is sometimes translated as “grace upon grace,” which can be interpreted to mean that we keep receiving God’s grace more and more abundantly.  However, a translation that may be truer to the Greek is “grace in place of grace.”  This makes more sense in the context of the next verse.  People received a kind of grace through the revelation of the Mosaic Law, but we receive a fuller grace through Jesus.  This happens as the New Covenant in Jesus Christ transcends the Old Covenant that was based on the Mosaic Law.

In verse 17, John contrasts what we received previously from the Mosaic Law with the “grace and truth” we receive through Jesus.  How is what we receive from Jesus greater than what the Mosaic Law offered?

In what ways do you receive “grace” through Jesus?

In what ways do you receive “truth” through Jesus?

Verse 18 says that no one has seen God.  Why is that, and how does Jesus change that?

Now that Jesus has come, people have seen God in the flesh.  What does Jesus’s presence as God-in-the-flesh (Emmanuel, “God with us”) teach us that we might otherwise not be able to understand about God?

In verse 18, John refers to Jesus as God the only Son.  He has now stated that Jesus Christ is the Word; that he was with God in the beginning; that he is God; that all things were created through him; that he became human and lived among us; that he is the Father’s only Son; and that he is God the Son.  Contrary to the claims of skeptics, these are not ideas that were manufactured by the Church centuries later.  It took time for the Church to settle on the exact words of the Creed, but John expressed all of these ideas here.

In what ways has Jesus revealed the Father to you?

Take a step back and consider this:

For Christians, we hear so often the idea that God became human that we can easily forget how amazing this claim is.  People who have never heard of Jesus have no concept that God would become one of us.  The oldest religions in the world (Hinduism, etc.) don’t have this concept.  When people create new religions, they might think that people can become gods, but they don’t envision the Creator of the universe coming to Earth and living as one of us.

What kind of God is infinite, eternal, and transcendent, but chooses to come and live the life of a finite, mortal, limited creature so that they could become like him?  What does this tell us about how much God cares about us?

How can you recapture more of the awe and appreciation that might come with first learning that God cares so much about us that he came to live as one of us to bring us to himself?