NOTES for Ин 1:1-18

John’s Gospel, like the Old Testament, begins with an account of Creation, and this sets a tone that helps us not only to see the days of Christ’s earthly life against their historical and cultural background, but also to understand their relation to eternity. The light brought into the world by Christ is not merely a metaphor for His teaching; it is the very light with which Creation began. In the same way, the Word that was in the beginning was not the kind of word that serves as a unit of speech. (How often the expression “in the beginning was the Word” is used in vain, detached from its true meaning!) But human words cannot save us from sin and death.

The account of the Word who dwelt among people is intertwined with the story of a man named John. Once again, we can sense the mysterious relationship between the eternal and the temporal, for it is only where they meet that we can understand the meaning of our existence revealed by the Bible. The Lord Himself, who belongs to eternity, entered the temporal world and showed its importance.

Christianity does not despise the temporal for the sake of the eternal, but transforms it by bringing it into communion with the eternal.