What does it mean that Jesus is the word

John opens his Gospel with a sentence that reorganized the world: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Word — Logos, in Greek: the reason, the ordering principle, the meaning behind everything. John takes the largest word his readers had for whatever makes the cosmos coherent, and says: that was in the beginning, that was God, and that became flesh. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The meaning of the universe is a Person.

This is why Christians cannot speak of Jesus as a great teacher and stop. A teacher delivers words about the truth; He is the truth (John 14:6) — the Word through whom everything that exists was spoken into being: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). Light, life, logic, language — all His handiwork, all His inheritance. “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). He does not describe the meaning; He constitutes it. That is the claim, and no smaller one is on offer.

And it is personal, for you, tonight. The Word that made galaxies speaks in sentences you can hear; the Light that began the universe “lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9) and is, this moment, shining in whatever dark brought you to this page — “and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5), but could not put it out. That Jesus is the Word means: reality is saying something, the something is a Someone, and He is not silent. He never was. He is not now.