In the first post of this Advent series, I introduced the idea that we have ‘harmonized’ Christmas, combining the different voices and stories of the Gospel writers. I think this homogenized story loses some of its rawness and punch. By ‘de-harmonizing’ we start to hear the voices more distinctly and recognize the melodies that each one is singing as special in their own right.

While Mark might be the least likely gospel to be chosen to read during Advent (though I’ve discovered that it may be in your lectionary for the second Sunday in Advent, it’s still a tough one to choose!), John is often read in the traditional ‘Nine Lessons’ services of Christmas. Like Mark, John does not narrate the details of Jesus’ birth in the way we are accustomed to – donkey, stable, angels and so on. He chooses a much more philosophical approach, exploring who Jesus is at the beginning, the first 18 verses, then showing his working through the rest of the book.

I love the phrase that John uses – ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. John is referring to both Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy – in a church context that increasingly has both people raised as Jews and others with a more Roman or Greek background. You can’t help but notice the parallels with the beginning of Genesis 1 in the first few verses of John. The Word is the creative power of God, as He speaks, things are, or things become. Yet the Word is also an image of prophecy in the Old Testament: throughout the books of Samuel and Kings, on to Isaiah and especially Jeremiah, the phrase ‘the word of the Lord’ means that God spoke through a prophet to communicate with His people; ignoring the prophet and the prophecy meant ignoring God .

To someone familiar with Greek philosophy, logos took a different meaning. It was the reason behind what happened – the suggestion that the cosmos was not accidental and random but structured and understandable. To some, it took on an almost spiritual meaning, the perfection of order in the universe.

John at once combines the two ideas and confounds them – the Word became flesh, sarx. Quite literally a four-letter word, especially in the turbulent times of the turn of the second century. Many suggested that the spiritual could have nothing to do with the fleshly, that we humans, ‘embodied souls’, sought to cast off the flesh to become a pure, spiritual being. John says that the perfect, immutable, only God, the animating force behind the universe became flesh to live with us.

But there’s more: ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.’ (John 1:14, ESV) The words ‘only Son’ (or ‘only begotten’ as I learned it at Sunday School!) are distinctive to John – it’s only applied to Jesus in John’s gospel and in the letter of 1 John. In Greek it’s one word – monogenes, one which obviously doesn’t have a direct English translation. Looking at the word, mono means one or only, while genes comes from the same root word that gave us the word ‘gene’ in English. I suppose you might say that Jesus is the only on with the exact same DNA as the Father – while being in the flesh! Not only that, but John says that they saw his glory while he was ‘in the flesh’, not needing to be without flesh.

For John, the material matters – because of Jesus being a fleshy human like us. We can’t just focus on the ‘spiritual matters’ and ignore physical ones, the divide won’t work. Humans, like Jesus are integral beings, both spirit and body in harmony. Neither can exist without the other and it is in the physical that glory is displayed. We can see the family likeness of the Father in Jesus because of his grace and truth. In a time when some are obsessed with truth, John says it’s the two together that show the DNA of God in Jesus.

We saw Mark set up a big mystery about who Jesus is, but John takes the exact opposite tack. He goes into the philosophy, the detail of what it means for Jesus to be fully human as well as divine, while still ignoring the material details of how, where and when (don’t worry, with two more weeks of Advent we’ve still got Matthew and Luke to give us those!) John reminds us that Christmas is not just about a baby in a manger, it’s bigger, with cosmic significance, it can’t be glossed over with fairy lights. The glory of God, the Father, is seen in the glory of Jesus, the Word become flesh, living with us. May you experience both the truth and grace of Christmas this year!