Born Under This Moon

Verse one of the Gospel of John is one of the most loaded sentences in the entire Bible. There aren’t many places in the Bible where the various translators agree, but this is one of them. Word for word, from the King James Version through the most popular modern translations, they present this formulation of the Word. At first blush, it is an enigma. The Word was with God and was God. It is like being beside himself.

Without this opening statement, though, we might easily go astray. John could just as easily have stopped with, The Word was with God, and we might have seen the Word in one way. Or he could have simply said, The Word was God, and we would come away thinking that The Word was just another of the many names of God.

But in saying the Word was with God and was God, John forces us to consider how that can be. The simplest explanation is usually the best, and leads naturally to the conclusion that God is a kind of being of which there are at least two. But that, for a Jew of that time, was an utter impossibility. For them, the oneness of God was a primary article of faith. How this conundrum is resolved, and where it leads, is one of the great stories of the New Testament.

The story is familiar from endless repetition. An angel of God appeared to a woman named Mary with an announcement so strange that Mary at first couldn’t even imagine it…