John 1:1-18

This time last year I blogged about the traditional Epiphany passage in Matthew’s gospel (https://solve-by-walking.com/2024/12/30/which-story/). This year I’m drawn to Sunday’s lectionary passage from John’s gospel, commonly referred to as the Prologue to John’s Gospel. What I’m writing here is a work in progress for me because I’m still developing my thinking around this, but what fascinates me is, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us…”

John’s gospel begins with, “In the beginning…,” reminding us of verse 1 of Genesis Chapter 1, the first creation story and the very first words in Scripture. John intends for us to make this connection but then changes it up: “In the beginning was the Word,” or in the Greek, the Logos. The Logos is God’s creating and speaking power, always with God, through which God created everything. Remember in Genesis where God speaks, and it is so? That’s the Logos, the Word of God. When John tells us that this Word of God became flesh and lived among us, he is describing the Incarnation, the belief that the Word of God existed with God from the beginning and became a human being, Jesus Christ, who lived among us, giving us the best picture of who God is and what humankind can be.

I am drawn to this text because of some reading I’ve been doing (as well as reading I continue to do and plan to do; thus the work in progress) about the Christian faith and anthropocentrism or “human supremacy.” On the recommendation of a dear friend, I read Daniel Quinn’s 1992 book, Ishmael, a philosophical novel exploring our cultural biases that Earth was created for humanity, and that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution. Once you’ve noticed this bias, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the catastrophic consequences for humankind, other species, and the environment that follow. Quinn posits that at one time, humans were just one of the many creatures inhabiting Earth, living as part of Creation, but we’ve stepped outside of the natural order of things. We’ve given ourselves the power to decide what is right and wrong for all life, and what is “right” generally means what we human beings want or believe we need, without regard for other species or the sustainability of the planet. In a nutshell, we behave as though the Earth belongs to us, and this has led to the problems we face such as global warming, mass species extinctions, food shortages, and overpopulation.

Quinn is not alone in this concern. Among other writers, Christian author Thomas Berry discusses this issue in his book, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth (2009). Ecologist Derrick Jensen tackles this concern head on in his book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (2016).

What does this have to do with John’s prologue? Verse 5 states, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” Cody J. Sanders challenges us to take this verse seriously as the inbreaking of God’s incarnate presence upon the cosmos, not in human flesh but in the cosmic order (logos) of creation. He writes, “This may very well open our perspective – as the whole prologue of the Gospel seems intent on doing – to the indwelling of God in the other-than-human realm of the cosmic order.” He notes that Margaret Daly-Denton reminds us that the Word becomes flesh, not man. Daly-Denton writes, “’The word became flesh,’ with all flesh’s implications of interconnectedness within the whole biotic community of life on Earth. … ‘Flesh’ is a far broader reality than ‘humanity.’” In a similar vein, Mary Coloe writes, “[Flesh] is all inclusive, male and female, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.” Sanders continues, “While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life. The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot imagine with our limited space-time perspective.”

It’s heavy stuff, right? But what we have been doing – treating Creation as though it belongs to humanity as opposed to treating humanity as though it is part of Creation – isn’t working. In Genesis 1:28, God tells the as-yet-unnamed first human beings, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” One could argue that a literal reading of this verse supports a conclusion that humankind is supposed to be in charge of all life on the planet. The simple fact that this hasn’t worked well for humanity or any other part of Creation weighs against such a literal reading; could anyone believe that God wants environmental degradation or catastrophe?

So what if, instead, we take Psalm 24:1 literally?
“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,
the world, and those who live in it.”

And what if the Word became flesh, “a far broader reality than humanity”?

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (1992)
Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (New York: Orbis Books, 2009)
Derrick Jensen, The Myth of Human Supremacy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016)
Cody J. Sanders,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-11