In Him Was Life (John 1.1-5)

Introduction

Have you ever looked up at the sky after sunset; perhaps on a balmy summer’s night, or maybe on a frosty winter’s evening? You can pick out some constellations quite easily; Orion with its distinctive belt of three stars - and the Plough maybe. You can usually pick out the North Star if you know roughly where to look and maybe one or two others - like Sirius, usually just above the horizon, and the brightest object in the night sky apart from the Moon.

(By the way, somebody once went up to John McEnroe and introduced himself as the brightest star of them all and John McEnroe said, “You cannot be Sirius!”

They say that about 6,000 individual stars are visible from the Earth with the naked eye. But that is of course only a very tiny fraction of all the suns that exist in the universe.

In fact, they think that there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, which measures 100,000 light-years across. That’s a lot of chocolate! But confectionery aside, what I’ve just said means that light, travelling at 186,000 miles/second, takes 100,000 years to get from one end of our galaxy to the other. Actually, on the macro scale, the Milky Way is just a walk around the block. They reckon that there are 200 billion galaxies like our Milky Way in the observable universe!

Put another way, how many grains of sand do you think there are on planet Earth? You’d have to use words ending with “illion” - like zillion, bazillion, squillion and kazillion to arrive at the number of grains of sand there in all the deserts, beaches, sandpits and egg-timers on our planet. Not to mention all that sand between your toes after a day out with the kids at Saltburn. It’s a lot of sand.

Well apparently, for every grain of sand there is on the Earth there are about a million stars in the universe.

And, when you gaze up into the cloudless night sky, do you look and begin to wonder? The universe, you, life itself, how we all got here, where it all came from, and is there anything, or anyone, out there beyond us?

In the Beginning…

Those are the sorts of questions the Apostle John was asking when he sat down to write his gospel. How did this all happen? Where does it all come from?  What’s it all made of? How did it get here? How did we get here? And he took a pen and jotted down some simple sentences; “In the beginning was the Word.”

When you go back all the way to the point when it all began, Jesus was already there. And he is the Word; because he is absolutely clear and always true.

The gospels say over and over that people sat up and listened whenever Jesus opened his mouth because he spoke with authority. It was nothing like the usual hot air from their rambling religious leaders.

He is the Word. They tried to trap him every time he walked into the public sphere and without fail he tied them up in knots with razor-sharp words of wisdom. He never withdrew anything he said because he never needed to, he never had to apologise, he never changed his mind, he never hesitated, and he never lied.

He is the Word. Everything he said was 100% the truth.

·       He said he would go to Jerusalem and he went.

·       He said he would suffer many things and he did.

·       He said he’d be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and he was.

·       He said they would mock him, spit on him and kill him and they did.

·       He said after three days he’d rise again and up from the grave he rose on the third day!

He is the Word. He only had to open his mouth and raging storms were instantly calmed. With a simple command from his lips, fig trees withered, all manner of sickness was cured, demons were sent packing and even the dead were raised. People marvelled. “Who is this man” they asked? They’d never seen anything like it.

He is the Word. In Romans 4.17 it says that he gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. He only needs to say one word over your life and things begin to shift. Abundant life springs out of utter hopelessness at the sound of his voice. No wonder John called Jesus the Word!

And listen, he is speaking today. Think of all the incomprehensible waffle you have to scroll through and ignore just to update the software on your mobile phone. But just one word from Jesus today can change everything in your world. He is the Word.

As I said last week, but for the benefit of those who were away, the Word is our English translation of the Greek word logos from which we get words like “logic.” Because of Jesus, life, the universe and everything is understandable – we can make logical sense of it. Because of Jesus, we can actually see who we really are and begin to get a feel for what God is like.

…He Was With God and He Was God

Verses 1-2 tell us two things about Jesus – he was with God in the beginning and he was God in the beginning. Christians believe that there is one God, in three persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each is distinct from the other, and each is equally - and fully - divine. The human mind does not have the room to grasp this.

It is incomprehensible to us. It is too elevated and wonderful for us to understand. God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are higher than ours.

Saint Augustine wrote fifteen volumes on the Trinity, can you imagine that? 15 separate but related books on the Trinity before he summed up with one of the most profound and exact statements which have ever been made about the triune God. Yet even he never got anywhere near to plumbing the full depths of the mysteries of the God who is Three in One. You just can’t bottle God in a jar and put a label on him.

In v3 it says “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

I mentioned just now the gargantuan magnitude of the heavens which point to the fact that we have a very great God, because he holds it all together. I could also speak about the infinitesimal constructions of the subatomic world which point to the fact that he meticulously orders the building blocks of matter.

Any learned professor would tell you, with eyes full of wonder, how implausible it is that life anywhere ever came to be at all, such are the overwhelming odds against it being possible. The laughably improbable existence of the universe points to the existence of a wise author who conceived it and called it into being. “Through him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made.”

I have spent about an hour this week following the progress of the Japanese Atatsuki orbiter that has successfully managed to start circling Venus and sending back data about it. (Is anyone aware by the way that a JAXA probe is now orbiting Venus? Well it is!)

Last week, I positively salivated for two hours over high resolution photos of Pluto just sent back from the New Horizons probe. We are the first generation of humans to see these things.

And when the Philae lander touched down on comet 67P last year, I nearly wet myself with excitement.

But space exploration only reveals the fantastic variety of what’s already there. It doesn’t shed any light on what anything actually means.

It gives you the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but not the ‘why’. The ‘what’ tells you the number of stars up there (give or take a few trillion). The ‘how’ tells you how far away they are. But the ‘why’ – why it was they burst into existence, from nothing, belongs to God, who brought it all about by speaking one word, his Word, the Word – the Lord Jesus Christ.

So in v4, the spotlight on Jesus intensifies. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.”

People talk of soft light, bright light, indirect light, diffuse light, natural light... what sort of light is Jesus?

A little later in v9 (and Mark will speak about this next week) it says what the light of Christ is like. John describes Jesus as true light, or real light.

It’s not that Jesus is a bit like light. It’s the other way round. Light is very much like Jesus. Jesus was there before light existed. It was he who said, “Let there be light” and something a bit like him appeared. But it’s actually Jesus who is the true light, and the real thing.

What do we mean that Jesus is light?

I can think of four different ways in which Jesus is light. And I’m going to run through them briefly.

·         He is light that points to the Father.

·         He is light that exposes sin.

·         He is light that leads the way.

·         And he is light that casts out darkness.

Firstly, He is light that points to the Father.

The word logos is also the root of our word “logic” as I said. But it’s also where we get our word “logo” from; Jesus is God’s logo – his public face.

When you see a silhouette of a certain piece of fruit with a chunk bitten out, you immediately think “Apple” – pricey smartphones and tablets. When you see five interlocking circles you think “Olympic Games” - elite sport. When you see a castle under an arc of fairy dust, you think “Walt Disney” – family entertainment.

A logo is the visual identity of a brand. You see a logo, you think of what it embodies.

Well, Jesus is God’s logo. What you look at Jesus you see the Father. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the most vivid picture of God it is possible to see. As a logo embodies a brand, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. “Anyone who has seen me,” Jesus said, “has seen the Father.”

Secondly, Jesus is light that exposes sin.

Martin McVeigh was an unknown Roman Catholic priest in Northern Ireland until he led an information meeting for parents and pupils at a primary school in his parish in March 2012. When he put his memory stick into a laptop he didn’t realise that Windows AutoPlay was enabled on the computer. The horrified parents and children were shown not a presentation on Holy Communion but a slideshow of pornography. He protested his innocence and denied knowledge of how the pictures came to be there, but the bishop relieved him of his duties.

That’s extreme, but Jesus is a light that exposes sin in my life and yours. Mercifully, he usually exposes our sin to us and not others. He brings to the light of our conscience things now hidden in darkness.

Thirdly, he is light that leads the way. 

A few years ago, I was on holiday in Normandy. One night, I went outside to get some wood from the cellar for the log fire. There was no moon. It was pitch black. But I'd been to the cellar a few times before and I reckoned I’d be OK.

But there was a steep stairway going down to the cellar and, on second thoughts, I didn't want to risk it, so I thought better of it and I went back inside for a torch. When I came outside again, I saw that the steep drop was much closer than I had remembered it. And if I hadn't gone back for some light, I probably would have fallen 7 feet or so down the stone stairway.

Some people have no idea where they’re going in life. But we know what we mean when we say we can see light at the end of the tunnel after a difficult period in life. Because we know how Jesus leads the way through life.

And fourthly, he is the light that drives out darkness. 

...Which brings us to v5. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Everywhere you go in the world, you find rich and poor. Wealth has never eradicated poverty and poverty has never completely swallowed up wealth.

There’s a lot of misery and brokenness in the world but never so much that it completely extinguishes everyone else’s happiness. In every society there is always a mixture of both.

In almost every area of life, when opposites coexist, we cannot be sure which will come out on top. But light is different. No matter how many experiments you conduct, you never find darkness pushing back light. The one unchangeable property of darkness is that it must give way to light. Always.

That’s what John is saying about Jesus here. He means that Jesus is always greater than evil and will decisively defeat it.

Jonathan Aitken was a Member of Parliament, Cabinet minister and on the Privy Council. You may remember him. He was exposed as a serial liar in court, was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and was handed an 18-month prison sentence. 

He’s written a book called “Pride and Perjury” and he says of that time in his life, “I went through the depths which encompassed defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and jail - a royal flush of crises, especially as they all took place within the public eye.”

He had been tipped by some at one point to be a future Prime Minister. But his fall from grace was spectacular and permanent. He never entered politics again and is now unelectable given his past.

The thing is, we all have our darkness and we can all fall from grace. But that is not the focus of Christmas. It isn’t that Jesus has come as a child in Bethlehem to show us how bad we are and tell us to sharpen up our act. We know the truth about ourselves. We don’t need an accuser to rub it in. But light always overcomes darkness.

Jonathan Aitken found that out. This is what he said; “God is a God of new beginnings…  This dawned on me in a police cell waiting for a decision about whether they were going to charge me. For the first time I read Mark’s gospel from beginning to end, and I remember being overwhelmed by the power of the narrative and the Passion chapters. I began to see dimly there my own story.”

He came to faith in Jesus Christ and he now serves as a volunteer in a Christian prison-visiting ministry.

That’s what it means when it says about Jesus in v4 “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.”

Ending

Jesus is light that points to the Father. Is it time to connect with the Father heart of God this morning? The Father who is there waiting for the prodigal sons and daughters to run back to the Father’s house?

Jesus is light that exposes sin. Is there something hidden that you need to bring out from the shame of darkness – where, undetected, it poisons your soul - into his laser-like healing light?

Jesus is light that leads the way. Are you hesitating about a big decision? Are you looking for direction in life? Are you fearful about stepping out in faith? Have you lost your way? Jesus said, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” He said “Follow me.”

And Jesus is light that casts out darkness. Are you hemmed in by assaults on your soul? Deliver us from evil! Do you have panic attacks? Deliver us from evil! Are you stalked by doubts and temptations? Deliver us from evil!

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever, Amen!

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 13th December 2015

In the Beginning Was the Word (John 1.1)

Introduction

A question for the men here, how many of you men at All Saints’ this morning can honestly say you positively enjoy shopping?

Well, isn’t that interesting? You might be interested to learn that a Psychologist called Dr. David Lewis was commissioned recently by a London shopping centre to monitor heart rates, blood pressure and stress hormones in male and female shoppers before, during and after their shopping trip.

Here’s what he found. The research showed that men's stress levels spiked alarmingly when faced with the prospect of choosing gifts and going into crowded shops, while only one in four women registered even a slight change.

Dr. Lewis said, "I was personally surprised by the very high levels of stress we found amongst the men. We were looking at blood pressure and heart rates and the secretion of stress hormones in some cases at a level we might expect to find in combat pilots or riot police officers in action!”

Another survey of regional trends among Christmas shoppers in the UK found that it’s Londoners who find the thought of hitting the High Street the most stressful.

43% of people in the East of England found parents to be the most difficult people to shop for. And more than half had particular trouble choosing a suitable gift for dads.

79% of people in Northern Ireland said they had bought a present for someone and when they opened it, no matter how pleased the recipient looked, the giver could tell that they obviously didn't like it.

And the report concluded that 66% of people in Yorkshire find Christmas gift buying “painful.”

Not stressful, or tiring, or time-consuming, but – with in what can only be a reference to excessive strain on the wallet – painful!

The exact words we choose reveal a lot. Words can be evocative. Sometimes words, because they are tied to a context, mean much, much more than they otherwise might. “That’s one small step for a man.” “I have a dream.” “They think it’s all over.” “Houston, we have a problem.”

These words are greater than a sum of their parts; they have weight and meaning and importance for us because we connect them to a significant event. The American fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss said, “Words have power. Words can light fires in the human mind. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.” 

Words

Today’s reading, just a single verse from John’s gospel says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Why did John say this? Have you ever wondered why he decided to sit down one day and write a fourth gospel? There were three perfectly good gospels already. It’s not as if people were saying, “No one has yet written down a record of what Jesus said and did. Quick, before the last eye witness falls off his perch, someone who knew him, write a book about what he said and did!”

Mark had already written about what Jesus did. Then Matthew and Luke produced two more gospels, adding many of the things Jesus said. John, though, wrote his gospel to tell the world about who Jesus is.

In 20.31, right near the end of the gospel, he says, "These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."

So if I’m going to accurately convey John's purpose in writing this gospel, my aim this morning must be to increase your faith in Jesus as God’s Son so you can enjoy the blessings and the life he came to give. And that is what I have prayed I will do, by the grace of God.

Sometimes people ask, “What is the difference between what you believe as Christians and what all the other religions believe? Aren’t they all the same?” And the answer is “No, they’re not the same at all.”

Every religion tells you what you need to do to move towards God. Only the Bible tells you what God has already done to move towards you.

Every religion has prayer. But the really important thing is not the words you say to connect with God. What counts is the Word God has already said to connect with you. And that Word is living and breathing – it’s Jesus.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I want to approach this verse from three different perspectives this morning. The first perspective is looking back. What does it say about creation and the origins of the universe? The second perspective is looking up. What does it say about what God is like? The third perspective is looking in. What does God say to the depths of your heart today?

Looking back

Firstly then, looking back. “In the beginning…” That means there was a beginning. That may sound obvious, but it hasn’t always been so.

100 years ago, scientists and philosophers almost unanimously agreed with Aristotle that the universe has always been there. “There is no creator” they said, “because everything we can see and feel and sense just always existed.”

But in 1929 an astronomer called Edwin Hubble (he wasn’t named after a telescope by the way; it was the other way round)… he made a discovery that almost no one before had ever imagined or conceived; he proved that the universe is actually expanding.

He calculated the rate of expansion and then, working his figures back, to point zero, he established that our universe is about 13.75 billion years old. So it wasn’t always there. It must have had a starting point. The Big Bang. But here’s the thing; cosmologists since then have come to agree that, at the point of creation, the raw materials for everything that now exists were... nothing. Everything that is, just appeared, by itself, like a rabbit out of an empty top hat. As if by magic.

Scripture of course has always affirmed that there was a beginning. And the Bible says goes on to say not only that there was a beginning, but also that God already existed beforehand.

Try and get your mind round that. This takes us all out of our depth. Can any human mind imagine what existence was like when there was no matter, when there was no time, and when there was nowhere? It’s inconceivable. It’s incomprehensible. It’s unfathomable. It’s inexplicable.

But the Bible states that the universe of time and space has not always been here - and science now concurs.

The Bible goes on to say that God made everything and therefore you are significant, you are loved, you have purpose and value. Atheism says nothing made everything and therefore your being here at all is just an accident, and your life is totally meaningless.

Have you ever wondered what lies beyond the edge of the universe? If the universe is expanding like an inflated balloon, what’s on the other side of the membrane? Nothing. What does nothing look like?

Or if you could travel back in time through millions of years and get to the point of creation, you’d go back, and back, and back – what would you find? You’d find that Jesus is already there. That’s what John 1.1 affirms; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

He was always there. He always will be. He spans the whole of time and space - and beyond. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He has complete sovereignty and total authority over all history; past, present and future. He knows where it all came from and he knows where it’s going.

Looking up

This is why John wrote his gospel. He wanted to show that Jesus is not just human size – he is God size. He is eternal. And if there is not eternity in Jesus, he can’t give you everlasting life.

I say “Jesus” but of course the name Jesus was only given to him when he was born in Bethlehem. The name Jesus describes what he came to do as a man. The angel Gabriel said to Mary “You will call him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. That’s what his name means. But before he was born in Bethlehem, Jesus wasn’t his name. Because it does not describe what he did before he was born.

He changed his name when he came to earth. In 3G the other week an Iranian man came to speak about his life. He changed his name by deed poll from Mehdi to Daniel to represent his new identity. It showed he was leaving behind his past and taking on something new.

Jesus did the same thing. Before he came to earth he had a different name. The Word is the first of many titles given to Jesus in John’s gospel. Each one has a significance and tells you something about who Jesus is and what he’s like.

Why was he called The Word? Because words form a connection between two people. You probably can’t read my mind. But if I talk to you, my spoken words express thoughts from my mind which are then received and processed by yours. And vice versa. Words connect us. They form a bridge between us.

Jesus is the Word because he perfectly expresses God’s ways, his thoughts, his ideas and his heart. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. What has God got to say to us? He’s said it all in Jesus.

“In the beginning was the word. The word was with God. The word was God.” “Word” there is our English translation of the Greek word logos, but logos means much more than “word.” It’s where we get the words logic, logical, logistics from and there is a history behind it.

We know John wrote his Gospel, in Greek, in Ephesus in the first century. Five centuries before Jesus was born, before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, lived a philosopher called Heraclitus, who also wrote in Greek, in Ephesus, about the logos. In fact, the logos was his big thing. It was central to his quest to understanding what made everything work. In his thinking, the logos meant the principle, or the basis that explains why things are the way they are.

The logos is the reason why things are the way they are. What’s the reason behind the patterns in sunshine and rain and wind? It’s meteo – logos (meteorology). What is the reason why people behave the way they do? It’s socio – logos (sociology). What is the reason why planets spin round the sun and stars collapse into black holes? It’s the cosmos – logos (cosmology). Every discipline of human understanding and learning comes back to its logos, the reason why it is like it is.

So when John wrote this Gospel, he deliberately picked up this language from Heraclitus – he said that Jesus is the logos, the Word, the reason why.

All things find their true sense, their ultimate meaning in him. He is the reason why you were born and have life. He is the reason why God loves you. Life, the universe and everything has a purpose; Jesus is the reason why.

Looking in

We’ve looked back (in the beginning) and we’ve looked up (the eternal Word of the Father, who always was, is now, and will be forever).

Now, we’re going to look in. What word does Jesus, the Word of the Father, say to you today?

People have invisible tapes that play in their soul all the time. Not literally. But people hear words that have been spoken over their lives again and again. And it’s like a tape that replays over and over again, words that have been said at significant moments in life.

Words like: You’re no good. I always wanted a boy. You’re ugly. I always wanted a girl. I’m leaving you. I wish you’d never been born. You’re fat. You always mess things up. You’ll never amount to anything. You’re a waste of space (I’m sorry about him, he’s from Barcelona). We don’t need you anymore. We’re letting you go. Can’t you do better than that?

Do you ever hear tapes like that?

As a teenager growing up without a father figure in his life, Richard Taylor’s existence revolved around crime and drug addiction in South Wales for which he served several sentences in H. M. Prison Swansea.

One night, in jail awaiting conviction and sentencing, he picked up the Gideons Bible that had been placed in his cell and tore out a page to roll a cigarette. This is how he explains what happened next:

“I opened the Bible randomly and tore out a page and made myself a roll-up. I struck the match, but suddenly, I found that I had an inner voice that I wasn’t used to hearing. It said ‘This is all wrong, I should be reading this, not putting a match to it.’

I blew the match out, unrolled the page, and began to read it. It was the Gospel of John chapter 1 [what we’ve been reading today]. I read the page… and then read most of that Gospel, about twenty chapters, before I put it down. I found it captivating. I was lying on my bunk with the Bible resting on my chest and fell asleep.

Sleeping in prison is not easy because of the noise and I wasn’t on any drugs – my usual way of drifting off to sleep. But, I slept the deepest and most peaceful sleep that I could remember. From early afternoon, right through to the next morning, I slept.

It was as if the weariness of years of turmoil, crime, drugs, aggression and fighting was being rolled away through peaceful sleep. My subconscious mind was being cleared of the nightmares of my life up to now. The Bible talks about the peace of God that passes anyone’s understanding and perhaps this was my first experience of it.”

Richard was then inexplicably spared a heavy sentence on condition that he spent some time in a Christian rehabilitation centre which he agreed to do. His life turned around and he is now one of the country’s most dynamic and influential church leaders.

The Detective Chief Superintendent of Gwent Police who had no control over Taylor in his days of spiralling crime can only admit that he is a reformed man and happily wrote an endorsement of Taylor’s autobiography To Catch a Thief.

A life turned around by the Word of God. And yet some people want to outlaw the distribution of Gideons Bibles in schools, hotels and prisons for fear either of offending people from other faiths or upsetting touchy atheists.

Jesus has the power and the authority to press “stop” on the tape playing back all those messages. Those words may have shattered your past. But they are not the words that need to shape your future.

Because so many feel unloved and rejected, Jesus is the Word who says, “I have loved you.”

Because so many are racked with guilt over the past, Jesus is the Word who says, “Father – forgive.”

Because so many are lonely and bereft, Jesus is the Word who says, ”I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

Because so many are sick, Jesus is the Word who says, “I am the Lord, who heals you.”

Because so many are tired, Jesus is the Word who says, “Come to me and I will give you rest.”

Because so many are in bondage to their addictions and compulsions, Jesus is the Word who says, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Because so many are under a cloud of heaviness and judgment, Jesus is the Word who says, “Neither do I condemn you, leave your life of sin.”

Because so many just can’t find any peace, Jesus is the Word who says “My peace I give to you… don’t let your heart be troubled or afraid.”

Because so many feel that everything is meaningless and there’s no point going on, Jesus is the Word who says “I have come to bring life in all its fullness.”

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 6th December 2015