Agapé and Logos

After I realized that the central theme for the Gospel According to John is agapé, because in the account of the Last Supper so much importance is given to agapé as the summary of all that Jesus had been doing for his whole ministry, I searched through the other themes. That took me back to the opening of the Gospel.

I still remember a time when I was studying for the ministry when we were learning about the Greek word ‘logos.’ One day when I was contemplating what ‘logos’ meant, I had the realization that it was the power of love. But not just any kind of love. To convey the full meaning of the way ‘logos’ appears in the opening of John, there had to be a focus on divine love and its creative power. Then later on in the class we learned that ‘agape’ pointed to that divine love. So not only was there spiritual meaning to the way ‘logos’ was used to open John’s gospel, but also there was spiritual meaning to the way Jesus used ‘agape’ in his teachings at the Last Supper. After all these decades I’ve come to see that just as the simple English attempt to translate ‘logos’ as ‘word’ was way off in giving the meaning of ‘logos,’ so I’ve come to realize that ‘love’ is way off in giving the meaning of ‘agapé.’

So what do we have in those opening verses? When we look for their meaning from the theme of agapé, we are able to show how the opening verses circle back to the teaching about agapé during the Last Supper. In the first 4 verses of John we find a description of logos as the spiritual power of divine creativity. It brought life to all that is — and infused all of life with deeply spiritual meaning. So John was showing that the eternal creative Essence came to flesh. Then he identified that eternal creative Essence with Jesus. And he then implied that Jesus identified with the eternal creative Essence.

And that seems to be the basis for the summary of his ministry as waking up people to the awareness of the agapé that had been poured into our hearts from the beginning of our creation. The spiritual meaning of agapé is divine creativity underlying human relationships — and of life itself. The ministry of Jesus opened people’s awareness of the power of agapé in their hearts; among other actions, it helped people see their identity with the eternal creative Essence.

So the opening of the Gospel According to John can be understood to mean:
In the beginning was the creative power. The creative power was in God’s presence, and the creative power was divine. He was present with divine power in the beginning. Through him all things came into being, and apart from him not a thing came to be. That which had come to be in him was life, and this life was the light of humanity. The light shines on in the darkness, for the darkness did not overcome it. … To those who did accept him he empowered to become God’s children.

The proof of those verses comes in both action and teaching. We look to what Jesus did among people and to what he taught. When Jesus is portrayed as identifying with the logos (as eternal creative Essence), and when he is quoted as saying “I am …” in a spiritual sense, those words were meant to realize that he identified more with eternal creative Essence than with the ego-identity people saw as ‘Jesus.’ And he was calling people to change their own way of viewing their own identity in the way he did.

The first example we can point to in John is when Jesus looked at the temple in Jerusalem, he said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” Obviously, he wasn’t meaning that he, in the form of Jesus, would build the temple. He was using “I” to mean the eternal creative Essence would be recognized as the true human identity and so there would no longer be any need for a structural temple. And when he said, “The water that I give will become in those who drink it a spring of water that bubbles up into eternal life,” he was referring to the “I” of eternal creative Essence, and when people become deeply aware of it within themselves, they will recognize their true identification with eternal life. So when he said, “I am not from this world,” he was saying that he wasn’t identifying with the ego-identity they saw as ‘Jesus’ but was identifying with eternal creative Essence. Then when he said, “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved,” he was saying that salvation is found in identifying with eternal creative Essence and not with anything else.