“Here we come to the sentence for the sake of which John wrote his gospel: John 1:14. He has thought and talked about the word of God, that powerful, creative, dynamic word which was the agent of creation, that guiding, directing, controlling word which puts order into the universe and intelligence into human beings. Now he says the most startling and incredible thing that he could have said. He says quite simply: ‘This word which created the world, this reason which controls the order of the world, has become a person, and with our own eyes we saw him.’ The word that John uses for seeing this word is theasthai; used in the NT more than twenty times and always used of physical sight. This is no spiritual vision seen with the eye of the soul or of the mind. John declares that the word actually came to earth in the form of a man and was seen by human eyes. He says: ‘If you want to see what this creating word, this controlling reason, is like, look at Jesus of Nazareth.’
This is where John parted with all thought which had gone before him. This was the entirely new thing which John brought to the Greek world for which he was writing. Augustine afterwards said that in his pre-Christian days he had read and studied the great pagan philosophers and had read many things, but he had never read that the word became flesh.
To a Greek, this was an impossible thing. The one thing that no Greek would ever have dreamed of was that God could take a body. To a Greek, the body was an evil, a prison house in which the soul was shackled, a tomb in which the spirit was confined. Plutarch, the wise old Greek, did not even believe that God could control the happenings of this world directly; he had to do it by deputies and intermediaries; it was nothing less than blasphemy to involve God in the affairs of the world. Philo could never have said it. He said: ‘The life of God has not descended to us; nor has it come as far as the necessities of the body.’ The great Roman Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, despised the body in comparison with the spirit. ‘Therefore despise the flesh—blood and bones and a network, a twisted skein of nerves and veins and arteries … The composition of the whole body is under corruption.’
Here was the shatteringly new thing—that God could and would become a human person, that God could enter into this life that we live, that eternity could appear in time, that somehow the Creator could appear in creation in such a way that he could actually be seen.
So staggeringly new was this conception of God in a human form that it is not surprising that even in the Church there were some who could not believe it. What John says is that the word became sarx. Now sarx is the very word Paul uses over and over again to describe what he called the flesh, human nature in all its weakness and in all its liability to sin. The very thought of taking this word and applying it to God was something that their minds staggered at. So there arose in the Church a body of people called Docetists.
Dokein is the Greek word for to seem to be. These people held that Jesus in fact was only a phantom; that his human body was not a real body; that he could not really feel hunger and weariness, sorrow and pain; that he was in fact a disembodied spirit in the apparent form of a man. John dealt with these people directly in his First Letter. ‘By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist’ (1 John 4:2–3). It is true that this heresy was born of a kind of mistaken reverence which recoiled from saying that Jesus was really, fully and truly human. To John, it contradicted the whole Christian gospel.
It may well be that we are often so eager to conserve the fact that Jesus was fully God that we tend to forget the fact that he was fully human. The word became flesh—here, perhaps as nowhere else in the New Testament, we have the full humanity of Jesus gloriously proclaimed. In Jesus we see the creating word of God, the controlling reason of God, taking human nature upon himself. In Jesus we see God living life as he would have lived it if he had been a man. Suppose we said nothing else about Jesus, we could still say that he shows us how God would live this life that we have to live.”
William Barclay
Title taken from The Message (Eugene Peterson)