NOTES for Joh 1:18-28

What can we know of God? Can the human words express what is above words and ideas? What books and which wise instructions can adequately describe God, Who nobody has ever seen? The first, the central message in the Gospel of John tells us about the Word, which being Itself Unspeakable expressed Itself till the end, because this Word is of the same nature as God. This Word isn't written in the book: It became flesh, a human being, one of us. If Moses could hear only unspeakable Name (God indeed said to him: "I am, no name can express My essence "), the author of the Gospel as for him saw the Man, Who could say: "I and my Father are one", "who has seen Me, has seen the Father ". We can now hear about God not only through the words of the law, limited by the expression of God's will: the person who wrote the Gospel saw God, listened to His own words, felt the warmth of His body, became His follower. He writes to testimony what he saw, how the Son manifested the One That nobody has ever seen.

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness". These words, if torn from their context, sound like a cry of loneliness, desperate in tone. A person who cries out in the wilderness will most often be heard by no one. But John is not the one crying in the wilderness; he is its voice. A voice in the wilderness is lonely and cannot fail to be heard, if there is someone to listen.

Absolute loneliness is always waiting. John waits very intensely; in the wilderness of loneliness it is impossible not to hear the steps of the One who can fill any loneliness. Therefore John becomes a hermit, so that he may be the first to hear and prepare the way, so that he may become a voice for those who do not hear on their own.

These words can be a consolation for those who feel lonely. In loneliness one hears better. Maybe God gives us loneliness so that it will be easier for us, amid the noise and rush of modern life, to make out His quiet voice, His call, His knock at the still closed doors of our heart. And if we open, the wilderness will be filled with God's light and joy.

Before us is John the Baptist’s testimony about the baptism of Jesus, handed down to us through the disciples; and while the other evangelists relied on the accounts of other people, the evangelist John is himself a witness. Thanks to this, we can come close to how the greatest of the prophets perceived the Greatest of the sons of men.

We become so accustomed to calling preaching a testimony that we begin to regard this description only as a figure of speech. Yet it has the most direct meaning: the preacher must answer for the truthfulness of his words, like witnesses in court, and, like testimony in court, preaching can affect the fate of those who hear it. It may influence a choice that leads to life or to death.

The baptism itself is scarcely described; the evangelist’s attention is focused on the events connected with it that took place in those days. Let us note, however, that when John the Baptist compares the Spirit to a dove, he does not literally liken Him to a created bird, but makes a comparison as he tries to find an image for expressing the inexpressible.

When reading today's passage, a question arises: why does John the Baptist still give no definite answer to the question asked him about his ministry (vv. 19-23)? Indeed, he had every right to define his mission as prophetic, and such an answer would have fully satisfied the commission sent by the Synagogue to check him (vv. 24-25). But John refuses on principle to speak of his ministry as something having significance of its own. He sees his mission only as a preliminary stage necessary for preparing the people for the coming of the Messiah-Christ, and outside the context of this task John's ministry evidently loses all meaning, including for the prophet himself (vv. 25-27).

And it is precisely this view of his own mission that enables John to see and recognize the Messiah (vv. 29-34). For in order to recognize Christ, it is not enough simply to see Him physically. Outwardly Jesus differed little from an ordinary person. Of course, what He said was not something one could hear every day or from everyone, but the main thing was still not in the words. The main thing was in the Kingdom that He carried with Him wherever He went. Therefore, in order to recognize in Jesus the Messiah-Christ promised by God, one had to touch and share in the Kingdom.

But one can share in the Kingdom only on one very important condition: the one seeking it must forget his own importance, forget that he, as well as his deeds and ministries, can mean anything in themselves apart from the Kingdom into which he wants to enter. Perhaps this is why John does not want to testify about himself as a prophet: all the great prophets of Israel had their own mission, and each of these missions was, in a certain sense, self-sufficient. Each prophet was a figure in his own right, and those around him always noticed this, even when, as was most often the case, the prophets themselves wanted nothing of the kind. But in those times, the prominence of the prophet helped accomplish the main task entrusted by God to one or another of His servants. Now, however, the task evidently consisted precisely in pointing to the Messiah and remaining as unnoticed as possible oneself. John the Baptist succeeds in this: he disappears in the radiance of the coming Messiah, and in the radiance of the Kingdom that the Messiah carries with Him.

What can we know about God? Can human words express what is beyond words and thought? What books and wise teachings can adequately describe the God whom no one has ever seen? The first and central message of the Gospel of John tells us of the Word through whom the Inexpressible One fully expressed Himself, for this Word shares God's very nature. This Word was not written in a book: He became flesh, a human being, one of us. Moses could only hear of the ineffability of the Name (in essence, God told him, “I am who I am; no name can express My essence”), whereas the author of the Gospel saw a Man who could say, “I and the Father are one,” and “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.” God can now be not only heard through the word of the Law, which expresses God's will only in a limited way: the man who wrote the Gospel saw God, heard His own words, felt the warmth of His body and became His disciple. He writes to bear witness to what he saw, to how the Son revealed the One whom no one has ever seen.

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.

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.

The Greek word "Logos," in different contexts, means not only "word," but also "meaning," "purpose," "knowledge," "reason," and even "way"... Then the incarnation of the Word is both the manifestation of Divine Reason for people, and the disclosure of His Purpose, and the revelation of the Way, and the appearance of the fullness of Communion (Participation), and all this in the one God-human person of Jesus Christ, who lived in this world, walked on this earth beside the disciples, who "saw, heard, and touched" Him (cf. 1 John 1:1).

The Gospel is always the testimony about Christ given by those who knew Him. We have the right not to believe them; we may take their words about grace, truth, and glory as a lie or as sincere error, as a poetic metaphor or an enthusiastic exaggeration - and then the Good News will not reach us, and we will gain neither meaning, nor communion, nor the way.

Here the evangelist John speaks about the essence of what he witnessed: the earthly life of Jesus Christ. Looking back sixty years after the events described, he sees and names the main thing: the pre-eternal Logos, the One in whom the whole meaning of the universe and the whole design for creation dwell, the One who is God, became incarnate, humbled His life to human life, and dwelt on earth, communicating with John and other contemporaries. Here, into our world, descended the fullness of grace and truth, becoming visible, audible, tangible, revealing to all that human flesh can contain the presence of God, can be pure from sin, can be raised to eternal life. The very word "glory," "the glory of God," means the visible, comprehensible manifestation of the invisible and incomprehensible God, not merely a symbol but the fact of His active presence. And the apostle John bears witness to this manifestation of God Himself in the person, the hypostasis in patristic terminology, of the only-begotten Son: the Son of God and the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.

Here two questions arise. The first: do we believe this testimony? This is not easy, for we are used to having everything proved to us, thereby being forced to agree, while here there is and can be no proof, no coercion. One must make one's own decision, a completely free one...

And the second question: even if all this happened, does it have any relation to my life? If we think carefully, all this reveals to us how high human life can be, how full of meaning and righteousness. More than that: if there is the presence of God in this world, then one can enter into it; and if God was able to enter a human body, then He can enter us as well. Thus a two-way union of our life with God's life, eternal life, is possible. Quite significant, is it not?