Remember the Last Gospel? The practice began in mediaeval times and continued until the Sixties. After the final blessing, the priest would move the altar book back to the gospel side and there would read today's pericope [John 1: 1-18], before leaving the altar. The reason for this practice at every service of Communion was to give emphasis to the central doctrine of Christianity, the Incarnation. Remaining in our service, however, is the practice of kneeling at the words of the Nicene Creed which speak of incarnation.
Our gospel text is sometimes called the prologue. It was written separately from the rest of John's gospel and tacked onto the beginning in order to clarify why Jesus is depicted so differently in John than in the earlier gospels. That is, to explain how the Jesus who said, "Don't call me good. Only God is good." [Matthew 19:17] ends up in John saying that he and the Father are one, and a person can only come to God through him. Also, to counter arguments at the time that John's material was heretical, by featuring a Jesus who is not fully human, but some kind of divine visitor from another dimension. (Some scholars speculate that "Jesus wept" was added to the gospel to counter the latter objection). Clearly the prologue reflects decades of the Johannine Community's spiritual experience encountering the fullness of God in Christ. Ben Herbster, founder of the United Church of Christ, said that in Jesus we see all of God that can be packed into a man!
The community sees in Jesus the logos, which in our text is inadequately translated, "the Word." In fact, the Greek term cannot be adequately translated into any English word that I know. The term comprehends the divine creative mind that brought the universe into being at the Big Bang, governs and sustains it. The logos holds everything together and allows everything to continue in being and have meaning. A little like the Higgs Boson Particle. The logos, we learn here, fully inhabited the person of Jesus, and in him dwelt in the midst of human society to show us what God is like. For Jesus is hailed as Emmanuel "God-with-us."
The Incarnation is a mystery, a reality to be lived into, not a problem to be analyzed or solved. It is encountered in heart-experience that leaves a person's life changed forever, the believer transformed and called into new relationship with others, the creation, and God. Martin Niemoeller, a German theologian of the last century, asked to interview Hitler and was allowed to do so. He wanted to take a measure of the man. Later when the bishops at the national synod of the German Lutheran Church stood and swore allegiance to Hitler, Niemoeller walked out, was arrested and then sent to Dachau. Miraculously he survived that concentration camp and was one of those rescued when the camps were liberated in 1945. In an interview thereafter, he was asked why he had paid such a price for his principles, and Niemoeller replied, "I pledge allegiance only to the Word-Made-Flesh." And so must we.
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