INTRO

Genesis and the Gospel of John are structured similarly and in quite a remarkable way. Each of the Gospels argue for a specific aspect of Jesus’ character. They do this by presenting scenes from the life of Christ and positioning them to underscore their claim. John’s Gospel is making the claim about the divinity of Jesus by aligning him with YHWH, Israel’s God. In a stroke of genius, John chooses to use different motifs from the Torah to structure his account. The one he employs for the start of Jesus’ ministry is the 7 Days of Creation in Genesis. 

It might be unusual to think of the Gospels as arguments; edited and weighed for consideration by the communities it was addressing. But around the time John was writing his Gospel, something called Gnosticism was widespread. Gnosticism was the ancient belief that the physical world was evil and only the spiritual world was good. (By the banned music my childhood Baptist church warned against, I’d say forms of it still exist today.) Gnostics taught that since Jesus was from God he couldn’t have had a physical form but appeared too. 

John grounds his Gospel account in the physicality of Jesus by saying, “The Word became flesh”. The word “flesh” here in ancient Greek is “sarx”. Sarx referred to the skin covering the bones and guts inside the body. It was a graphic and unclean word. John is saying the same divine and apparent nature that help to create the world DID enter into it in a human body. Just like the tent of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness that stretched to contain the Glory of God, so was Jesus this same God in a tent of a body. By extension, this tells us that your body isn’t bad. The flesh isn’t bad. In fact, it was the very conduit for the salvation of the Cosmos.