NOTES for Joh 1:1-18
The remarkable hymn that begins the Gospel of John opens to us the mystery of God's inner life. God is a person, in a certain sense the same as each of us. Only (and in this "only" lies the absolute difference between God and humanity), unlike any of us, He is an infinite Person. Conditioned by nothing except His own will, and therefore by Himself. And therefore in need of no one. And, naturally, under no obligation to tell anyone anything about His life. Why He needs creation, why He needs all of us, is His mystery. One would have to be Him to know the answer. But the fact remains: He created the world and us as part of this world. And He loves us. And He opens to us, just a little, the mystery of His life. It turns out that He, like us, does not merely know Himself. He also continuously comes to know Himself.
How He manages this is His mystery. We, of course, would not be able simultaneously to know ourselves in fullness, to know ourselves in all depth, and at the same time to remain in complete peace. And also outside all the spaces and times that exist in the created world. More precisely, above them. How this happens with Him, we will never know. But in this is the fullness of His life. And He reveals this fullness to the world. He projects it into the world. And He contains this fullness of His life within the boundaries of human nature. Of course, not such as ours. But still human. Such as our humanity could have been if not for the fall.
And yet this is created nature. Created by Him as well. But from the very beginning we human beings were not merely nature alone. From the very beginning we were given that breath of life which, properly speaking, makes us human. And this is His breath. The breath that breathes in us. His presence in us. Of course, not in the fullness proper to His own life. But still His. And if not for the fall, we would be completely different: not thanks to some special nature that was taken away from us after the fall, but thanks to the fact that our life would be wholly determined by this breath.
And not by the minimal degree to which it determines our life now, when this breath in us is at times barely noticeable even to ourselves. But if He wills, His presence in a human being can become complete. Such as it abides in Him Himself. And then into the world will be born the Human Being with a capital letter. The Human Being in whom God will be revealed to the world in fullness. And through whom His life will be opened to each of us in the same fullness. The life that the Savior came to give us. Life in fullness and abundance.