making God known

Here is another theme which will repeat through the rest of John's story:  
No one can know God.  Jewish people had the words which God had given, and the written stories of what God had done.  So they were in the enviable position of being able to know quite a lot about God, much more than other people.  But here John tells us that this is not enough.  No one has seen God; nobody is intimate enough with God to introduce him.

But this person, the one that is at the centre of this mysterious eulogy, and in fact is the essence of the entire narrative to follow, is intimate with God.  Every paragraph, almost every sentence, so far has been telling us this in different ways.  But the first sentence (the Word was with God, and the Word was God) is the clearest and most uncompromising until we get to this last sentence of the prologue.

This "One and Only", we have already been told (have a look at the first post "unique glory" for a discussion of this phrase), came from the Father.  Now John goes further:  this person 'is himself God'.  This is a bit weird if one thinks about it.  It is clear that in this whole section, John is trying to build a multifaceted picture which will somehow hook us up to a cosmic truth which is too big to fully express.  I think that John hopes we'll connect with this  at a super-cognitive level, and that this will pull us along through the narrative which follows, forcing us to consider Jesus in more dimensions than we would have otherwise.

In the same way that he struggled in our first paragraph, John wrestles here, within this different image, to help us not to get our ideas too narrow.  This person is himself God, but from another perspective he is the only [Son] of the Father, and now he intensifies this:  "is in closest relationship with the Father".
But this interprets what is really an image - the one who is in the chest (or bosom, or breast) of the Father.  Other translations vary from the old in the bosom of the Father, through nearest the Father's heart, and at the Father's side. to in the intimate presence of the Father.  One picture is of a person (most commonly it would be a child) who is snuggled into the upper part of a Father's garment, inside his jacket, very close both physically and emotionally.  The other is of someone in the chest cavity of the Father, heart to heart in a sense, sharing everything.  The meaning is clear:  intimacy of the highest order, including commonality of personality and purpose.


This is the person John is going to tell us about, and we need to be ready, because the point is that he is so close to God that he is able to "make God known".  There is someone here worth knowing about; this is a story worth our fullest attention.  We are going to need the astonishment that this whole "prologue" has created in us if we are to read with enough dynamic insight to see what John is seeking to communicate with us.