 Throughout my life, I've increasingly found that reading scripture in public isn't just about feeding our own spirits and minds. It's about rehearsing the mighty acts of God for God's glory. So let's think together about John 1.14. And first, we're going to need some tea. This verse, John 1.14, is the climax of the Johannine prologue. John writes this majestic opening to his gospel. It's rather like the remarkable gateway into a great house, or maybe even a great city, that this says where we're coming to now is extraordinary. It's just beyond special. And this is the climax of it. The word became flesh. And that was a shock in John's world. It was a shock in the second and third centuries as people were studying John's gospel. Because there were many people in the ancient world for whom the idea of flesh was something nasty. It was corrupt. This stuff of which were composed leads us astray into sin. And anyway, it gets sick and it's going to die. And many there were who said, thank goodness we can get rid of this flesh when we die and we'll go somewhere else instead. But the idea that the word of God, who earlier in this prologue, John has said the word was God, that the word became flesh. This is scandalous. This is extraordinary. But this is deeply rooted in Israel's scriptures. The Johannine prologue, which climaxes with this verse, begins in the beginning was the word. In the beginning, echoing Genesis chapter 1. And there's a great deal about John 1, 1 to 18 with verse 14 as its climax, which resonates with that story of creation. Because John's gospel is all about creation and new creation. The creation which is fulfilled in Jesus and then the new creation which emerges as he dies to defeat the power of all the hostile anti-God and anti-creation forces and to launch God's new creation in his own resurrection body. But this passage doesn't just resonate with the book of Genesis. It resonates also with the book of Exodus. Because just as in the Old Testament, the people who are called by God in Genesis, Abraham and his family, have to go through that awful time in Egypt in order then to know themselves as the rescued, the saved people. They go through all that in order then to become the tabernacle bearing people, the people in whose midst the creator of all comes to dwell as an anticipation of the time when he will come to dwell fully and finally in the whole earth. That's what the tabernacle at the end of Exodus is all about. And in a sense, there's a line, a narrative arc that runs from the beginning of Genesis through to the end of Exodus, that the tabernacle is like the small working model of new creation. The purposes of God, the creator, are now tabernacling in person, in glory, in the midst of Israel to lead them where they are going. But then of course as the story unwinds, that becomes more complicated than you could even have imagined. But throughout the Old Testament, it is looking ahead. It's a matter of hope. And John says the hope has now arrived. One of the most frustrating words to translate in this verse is the word that I've rendered, lived among us. Because the English word lived doesn't get a quarter of what John has put in at that point. Hologos saks ergenator, the word became flesh, kai eskenosen enhemen, and tabernacled in our midst. Yes, this is the line from Genesis to Exodus. The word through whom and through which all things were made came and pitched his tent in our midst. If the tabernacle was a small working model of new creation against the day when it would actually happen, Jesus in himself is the beginning of that new creation. And that's why just as when the glorious presence of God came to dwell in the tabernacle and then subsequently in the temple in Jerusalem, so John says, we gazed upon his glory, glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth. This is the heart of what John wants to tell us. That when we are looking at Jesus, when in fact we are reading John's story of Jesus, we should expect to be discovering that it's like being there in the tabernacle with the glory of the Lord being revealed. And the paradox of that is that if we say the glory of the Lord, we might think in terms of blinding light or glorious music or whatever, but what we see in John's Gospel is the humiliation of the word made flesh, the one who weeps at the tomb of his friend in chapter 11, the one who in chapter 13 squats down and washes the dirty muddy feet of his followers. This is what it looks like when the word becomes flesh all the way to the time when he hangs on the cross and finally says, it is finished. It is accomplished. This is the new Genesis, the task of the creation's redemption is complete. And now we are ready for the launch of new creation. This is what it means to follow through on John 1.14, that the word through whom all was made became flesh, tabernacle in our midst, and we gazed upon his glory. There are those who say that the vision of God, the beatific vision, is the ultimate summation of where we're going as Christians. That's our pilgrimage. John says the beatific vision happens right now when you read this story and realize that you are gazing on the glory of God. So may God give you grace and faith and joy in his service, that in gazing upon his glory you may know him in spirit and in truth. Amen.