Grace Upon Grace

The first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John, known as the Prologue, have been near and dear to my heart for a long time. They were the first sentences I ever translated from Greek into English, way back in high school. They are so full of meaning, so mystical, that if I spend the rest of my life studying them I will still only have begun to plumb their depths.

They always show up on the first Sunday after Christmas, and fittingly so. Once the cultural frenzy of Christmas itself has passed, there is time for people of faith to stop and reflect on what it all means. That’s what John does for us. He places a particular birth in a particular time within the context of eternity, and so helps us place our own particular place and time within God’s unending time.

“In the beginning” – right back to the first words of the Bible, John takes us, before creation itself. “Was” – the Greek verb expresses ongoing time, continuing action. “The Word” – all of the multivalent meanings of “Logos” in Greek are brought to bear: thought, reason, what goes on inwardly as well as the outward expression of inner thought through speech. God’s thought is God’s speech is God’s action. That’s what the doctrine of the Trinity is all about. God the Father speaks through God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit. John gets all of that meaning in just the first few verses.

Because the Word arises from the heart of God, speaking what God thinks, I am used to saying that Jesus Christ is God’s most complete self-revelation to humanity. That’s part of what makes me a Christian. But the fourteenth-century mystic Johannes Tauler takes that concept even further. In uttering the Word, Tauler says, God also comprehends himself. The implication is that without begetting the eternal Word, God the Father would not be able to know himself.

Yet the Prologue doesn’t remain in the realm of the eternal. John soon switches to punctiliar verbs, ones that place an action at a particular point in time. John the Baptist is born (“happened” in the Greek). And remarkably enough, so was the eternal Word, born in the flesh.

Every time I get to the verse, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” my spine starts tingling. If I’m reading it out loud, I have to stop and collect myself. That’s the absolute center of our faith. God in all of God’s fullness, the eternal Word through whom all things came into being, emptied himself and became a finite human being. “God became human that humans might become God,” as St. Athanasius put it. The enormity of that, the utter grace of it, gets me every time.

Through Jesus Christ, who is the Word become flesh, we all receive grace upon grace, grace freely given to us out of the fullness of the eternal God. It is a grace that is totally unmerited. By many it is not even accepted, as John well knew. Yet God offers it nonetheless. How could God do anything else? For it is the very nature of God to speak the Word, to reveal God’s self, to enter the particularity of time and place so that we, too, might witness to that eternal conversation of love that is God.


Christmas 1: John 1:1-18. For those who keep track of such things, the actual quotation from Tauler is: “In this pure act of self-comprehension [the Father] utters Himself completely by a Word; and the Word is His Son. And the act whereby He knows Himself is the generation of the Son in eternity.” Johannes Tauler: Sermons, p. 36 (Paulist Press).