The starting point for such reflection, naturally, begins with the opening
chapters of Genesis. Thefirst creation account in Genesis 1 begins with God
issuing commands: Let there be light—and there was light. Let there be a
firmament...Let the waters under the heavens be gathered...Let the earth put
forth vegetation...Let there be light in thefirmament...Let water bring forth
swarms of living creatures...Let the earth bring forth living creatures...and so
on. This divine utterance‘fiat’—‘Let it be!’—is sufficient to bring all these
creatures into existence:‘and it was so...and it was good’. Having declared all
these things into existence by a word alone, God then announces his own
project, not with an injunction but in the subjunctive:‘Then God said,“Let us
make the human being [ἄνθρωπος] in our image, after our likeness.”’^3 The
express intention and work of God is to fashion a human being in his image
and likeness. This is the work of God; it is the only thing that he specifically
deliberates about and the project to which he sets his mind. This is the divine
purpose and resolve. And, yet, this is the only thing that is not followed by the
words‘and it was so’.
This divine project is picked up by John in his Gospel. The interplay
between the Gospel of John and thefirst chapter of Genesis is of course clear
from the fact that John intentionally echoes the opening words of Scripture
with the opening words of his prologue:‘In the beginning...’. But there is
another cross-reference that is less obvious, but much more profound and to
our point. The Gospel of John commences where Matthew, Mark, and Luke
conclude. In the Synoptic accounts, it is only at the end—when the Scriptures
are opened to show that Moses and all the prophets spoke of how the Son of
Man must suffer to enter into his glory, and the bread is broken—that the
disciplesfinally recognize Christ and know who he is; at this point, however,
Christ immediately disappears from sight (cf. Luke 24:13–35). But this is
the very point at which the Gospel of John begins. After the prologue, the
narrative begins with the Baptist crying out when he sees Jesus: ‘Behold
the Lamb of God’(John 1:29). Then, when Philip tells Nathaniel,‘we have
found the one of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote’, Christ tells
him,‘you will see greater things than these’(John 1:44–51). The Gospel of
John, of‘the theologian’as he was known in the ancient church, presents us
with the same work of Christ, but told from a divine perspective. John no
longer merely recounts the history of Christ, but interprets that work, with the
Scriptures opened, in theological terms.
In his Gospel, John depicts Christ as the exalted Lord from the beginning.
Christ repeatedly tells his disciples that he is from above—from the heavens, of
the Father—while they are from below, of the earth. As such, if Christ goes to
the cross, he does so voluntarily, and therefore his elevation on the crossishis
(^3) Gen. 1:26, LXX; the Septuagint was of course the text from which the fathers were
working.
20 John Behr