[John 1:1-5]

John starts writing at the beginning.

Not the beginning of the book. At THE beginning. You know, the one that came right after there was nothing.

When he wrote, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” he knew he was writing a controversial statement. He was making a claim. But he wasn’t so much making an argument about the beginning part.

“In the beginning” is an echo of the start of the whole collection of books we know as the Bible. For John, as for the rest of the followers of Jesus, as for Jesus himself, this phrase reminded them of words they had been hearing their whole lives.

“Bereishit” if they were hearing it in Hebrew, “en arche” in Greek. “In the beginning.”

They had grown up with a confidence that there was a beginning and that when this beginning happened, God is the one who made it happen.  And now John is saying that “the Word” was also God.

That’s the controversial part.

John was saying that someone, known as “the Word”, had been with God at the very beginning. He was saying that this “Word” was involved in creating, was, in fact, the means of creating.

For people who had grown up hearing, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” John was being pretty direct. He was expanding God somehow. He was challenging religious understandings. He was setting a pretty high standard for what he would need to show.

Of course, from John’s perspective, as we will see, he was merely being factual. And he isn’t wandering too far from Genesis, where God said and things were.

How, after all, did God say anything without the Word, in the beginning?