Pastor's Page: In the Beginning...Jesus

Those first century men and women who personally encountered Jesus in his lifetime, who became his disciples, and experienced the power of his resurrection and his indwelling Spirit, had to struggle mightily to find the words to explain who he really was. He was a man—no doubt about that, but he was more than a man, even more than an extraordinary man. He was more than just a great prophet or rabbi. He was more than an anointed healer, more than a king, more than an apostle sent by God.

Jesus’s identity confounded people all his days. Many scoffed, “He’s just a man from Nazareth.” His followers, however, made great professions of faith. Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God. The Apostle Thomas declared of him, “My Lord and My God.” 

It took some time for Christians to hammer out the doctrine of the Trinity, even though all the elements necessary for Trinitarianism were already in place in the New Testament. For us, we confidently identify Jesus as God the Son, but we come to such a conclusion only in the aftermath of centuries of debates and theologizing. The earliest Jewish Christians, however, struggled to explain Jesus’s identity without violating their fierce monotheism forged by the divine words, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” (Isa 45:5).

We see the struggle to give the right place to Jesus in the four Gospels, especially in their respective introductions. Mark explains Jesus by linking him to John the Baptist and depicting the Baptist as the Isaianic forerunner to the Lord’s Messiah, in fulfillment of all the scriptures. Matthew affirms Mark’s portrait but adds that Jesus fulfills the Abrahamic covenant to bless all the nations through the Jewish king. By tracing Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam, Luke makes an even more extraordinary claim about Jesus—the New Man Jesus overturns the failure of the Old Man Adam and reverses the curses.

In introducing Jesus, John the Evangelist outdoes the other three gospel writers. Yes, John agrees with Matthew, Mark and Luke, but John dares to make an even higher claim for Jesus. He depicts Jesus’s identity as centered in God: “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God” (John 1:1). More specifically, Jesus is co-eternal with God, and ever-present with God from the beginning. Still, even such striking alignment with God is not yet adequate to explain Jesus. John takes it a step further and identifies Jesus himself as God himself: “The Word was God.”

This Jesus, who is the light of the world, who created all things, is the source of everything we need. He is the bread. He is the Light. He is the Gate. He is the Good Shepherd. He is the Resurrection and the Life. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the True Vine. He is. He is.

Pastor Jim