January 2, 2022 “Known” – John 1:10-18

John 1:10-18
“Known”
January 2, 2022 – Second Sunday after Christmas

He woke from a coma in a hospital in Berlin only to discover that no one seemed to know him. That was the beginning of “Unknown,” a Liam Neeson thriller from 2011. Neeson as Martin Harris goes to the hotel where he and his wife were staying. His wife refuses to recognize him. She is with another man who has taken Martin’s identity. All the people who should know him do not. They refuse to accept him for who he is.

It’s not just a movie plot. Our text this morning begins after John has introduced us to the “Word” who was in the beginning and who “was with God and was God.” In verses 10 and 11 that Word who is Jesus “was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” It’s a little jarring after we’ve just been celebrating the glorious arrival of Jesus in the world. Rustic shepherds and foreign magi came to see the infant Jesus. Angels sang about Him from heaven. Yet here He is, unknown.

It’s what we heard in our Gospel text from last week too. Mary and Joseph took twelve-year-old Jesus to Jerusalem. There He went and sat and discussed the Scriptures with scholars in the Temple. They were amazed at His understanding, but they did not know who He really was. Even Mary and Joseph had to be reminded by Jesus when He told them, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

Martin in the Liam Neeson film was unknown to people who should have known him. But others to whom he was only a stranger came to believe in him and trust him: a female taxi driver who was an undocumented immigrant, a kind nurse, a former agent of the East German secret police, the Stasi. A collection of unlikely people became the only ones who believed he really was Martin.

In verse 12, we find there were also those who believed in and trusted Jesus when others did not. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” As we read on in the Gospel we see that believers in Jesus were also a collection of unlikely people: poor fishermen, a tax collector, a revolutionary or two, prostitutes, foreigners, children. The religious establishment of His own people, the ones who should have been quickest to accept Him and be close to Him, held back.

Yet John tells us that all who received Him were able to become children of God, to be Jesus’ brothers and sisters. Even a few righteous religious folk took a chance on Jesus, as we see in chapter 3 of John. God offered anyone who would accept it the chance to know His Son, and thereby to know Him. The only natural Son of God was not at all jealous of His status. He came to share His position as a child of God.

Again, as we hear more fully in chapter 3, Jesus came, it says in verse 13 here, so that children of God might be born, “not of blood or of the will of flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” As you probably remember, in chapter 3 of John, Jesus told Nicodemus “You must be born again.” Here is the first word about that in John’s Gospel. Children of God need to be born of God, from God. In other words, they need to be born like Jesus was.

Part of the Christmas story is that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born. He was born of a human mother, but His conception did not happen as it does for everyone else, originating in human flesh and blood, with the aid of a man. No, the angel told Mary, her child was not going to be the son of a man, but the Son of God.

St. Augustine says that Jesus came to be born of a woman, as we heard from Titus on Christmas Eve, born of a human being, so that human beings might, in turn, be born like He was, born of God. In our reading from Ephesians, Paul said that God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ…” For that to happen, says John, we need to receive Jesus, to believe in His name, to believe in Him. We need to know the unknown one, the one whom others refuse to know.

Jesus was not jealous of His status as the Son of God. He is willing to share being a child of God with anyone. But we need to know Him. That’s why He was willing to share our status as human beings. Beautiful verse 14 is often where we stop reading in this chapter. It is so profound that it feels like the climax, the whole point of everything John has to say here at the beginning of his Gospel. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us; and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” We could spend all morning just unpacking that one verse.

The Word becoming flesh is what I just said, that He had a human mother, that He was and is a human being, like us. Yet that next phrase is the key to our need to know Him. The Word in the flesh “lived among us.” You may have heard that that this word “lived” or “dwelt” is literally “to pitch a tent.” It goes back to the Old Testament and how God was present in the Tabernacle, in a tent, with His people then. Now the human flesh of Jesus is the tent in which God came to be present with us.

Eugene Peterson brilliantly paraphrased that idea of pitching a tent among us by saying that the Word, that Jesus, “moved into the neighborhood.” That’s how we often get to know someone, especially if they are different from us. We may have all sorts of information about people of other ethnicities or other nationalities or other religions or other differences of many kinds. But when they move next door, when you pause in the driveway for conversation as they walk by, you gain a new perspective, a whole other kind of knowledge.

If that different sort of neighbor lends a hand when you’re moving a heavy piece of furniture, or if you bring them cookies when they move in, or if snow falls and blocks your street and you work side by side to shovel it out, then that direct, personal knowledge of the other person grows and grows. You may become friends.

To give us that kind of personal, direct knowledge of God is why Jesus moved into our neighborhood. Jesus came to show us that God’s glory is not just awesome and terrifying, but also full of grace and truth. Jesus came to show us clearly the God of grace, the God of love who befriends us, who wants us to love Him like children love a parent. To know all that about Jesus and thus to know that about God is what will make us God’s children.

The next verse, 15, is in parentheses in my version and maybe in yours. It’s a report of what John the Baptist said about Jesus before Jesus made His public appearance. “This was he of whom I said, ‘he who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’” Down in verse 30 we hear John say it again directly to his own disciples. Literally, it’s even odder, “The one coming behind me is in front of me because He was before me.”

Yet, as F. F. Bruce points out, that behind, in front of, before conundrum is not all that difficult if we’ve been paying attention. The first verses of the chapter told us that the Word was in the beginning, that He was with God, that He was God. So of course He the Word was before John. He was before everyone and everything. He made it all. And He’s in front of John, ranked above him, because God is above everyone and everything. Yet as a human being, He’s both younger than John and appears on the scene later than John.

By sticking in here that tongue-twister from John the Baptist, John the Gospel writer wants to remind us that the one full of grace and truth, the one we need to know in order to be God’s children, is Himself fully and completely God. It’s not just a human being that we want and need to know. It is God.

Verse 16 makes it clear that God does want us to know Him. In these days many of us live more privately in our neighborhoods. The pandemic made that worse. We may not want to go out and get to know our neighbors. And they don’t necessarily want to know us. Several years ago now we invited people in three houses on our little crescent of cul de sac over for dinner. Only two families accepted our invitation. The third still doesn’t really care to get to know us. Yet God wants to know us and for us to know Him. “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”

Jesus is full of grace and this text about Him is full of grace, “grace upon grace.” That grace is the gift and blessing of knowing Him and thereby knowing God and becoming not just a neighbor but part of His family, His children.

It’s not at all the whole story of the Old Testament, but what John says at the beginning of verse 17 is often the impression we get of God before Jesus came, “The law indeed was given through Moses…” The grace is there too in God’s dealings with the children of Israel, but we also feel this overwhelming power of law. God gave the ten commandments and many more. People break them and God punishes them. But grace was in the Old Testament too. We heard from Jeremiah 31:9 today, “for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.” God has always loved people as his children. It’s just that they, and we, didn’t always realize this, didn’t really know Him.

So in contrast to the law that “was given through Moses,” John tells us in verse 17 that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” And there for the first time in his book, in his Gospel, John just says it straight out, the name of Jesus. Jesus is the Word. Jesus is the one full of grace and truth.

And in the last verse, John dispels any ideas we might have that God does not care about us, that God does not want to know us or does not want us to know Him. He wants us to see that God is not some unfriendly neighbor, or worse yet, some distant authority figure who only wants to call the shots from far away in heaven.

So the beginning of verse 18 tells us something we hear in the Old Testament several times, “No one has ever seen God.” Which is just what we might have feared. We can’t see God so we can’t know God. No one really knows Him. No one really gets close to Him.

The theologian Karl Barth is known for coming down hard on this business of not begin able to see God, not ever being able to really know Him. In German the phrase Barth used was that God is totaliter aliter, “totally other.” God is so different and far from us that we have no hope of ever knowing Him or even saying anything true about Him. Sometimes Barth’s critics noted that he had an awful lot to say, a dozen thick volumes worth, about this God we can’t say anything about. But to focus in on that “totally other,” on God’s distance from us, would be to get Barth wrong and to get God wrong. Here is what Barth had to say as he reflected on the verses we’ve read today.

“What is it that we heard? That no [one] hath seen God at any time? That we are so far from God, so godless and god-forsaken? No, for although we did hear this, we heard also the declaration of God brought us by the One who is in the bosom of the Father, and “of his fullness have all we received, and grace [upon] grace.”[1] Barth knew that in Jesus God had come close, that He had made himself known in His Son.

So in another place writing about these verses, Barth says “The emphasis in the confession of God’s hiddenness is not primarily that of humility but first and decisively that of gratitude.”[2] When the Bible says that God cannot be seen, it is not so much to highlight our very real human limitations and even our sin. It is much, much more to remark on the remarkable grace that God has made it possible for us to see Him after all, most clearly and most beautifully in His Son.

In the movie I spoke of at the beginning, Martin Harris was grateful to get his life back through the gracious gift of new friends who believed him and came to know him. We are blessed and grateful to receive the gift of life when we receive and come to know Jesus Christ. Yes, God is far away and unseen, but that makes it all the more wonderful that in Christ His Son we are given grace to know Him.

So that is how we come to the Lord’s Table on this second Sunday of Christmas, with deep and abiding gratitude. That’s what the word often used by Christians for this Table, “Eucharist.” It means “thanksgiving.” We give thanks because God is not unknown. He has made Himself known in Jesus Christ. We have seen His glory, His grace, His truth. And we see Him again here now, in bread and cup, in the Body and the Blood, the Word become flesh and living among us. He wants you to know Him. You can and you may. Come and receive and know Jesus today.

Amen.

[1] Church Dogmatics IV.2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958), p. 353.

[2] Church Dogmatics II.1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), p. 192.