Why is Jesus called the Word?
The Bible uses lots of titles for Jesus. Son of God, Alpha and Omega, Lord, Son of Man. Most of these names, while they may be somewhat unfamiliar language, are easy to explain. But of all the titles used for Jesus in the Bible, there’s one used in the beginning of John’s Gospel that’s probably the most obscure and hard to understand. In the first verse of his Gospel, he writes, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The “Word” is obviously an unusual title for a person. At no point in the history of the English language has calling a person a word ever carried a coherent meaning. So why would John use this title for Jesus, and why does it matter?
“Word” in John 1:1 and other verses is a direct translation of the Greek word logos. It is in fact the Greek word for “word.” But it also had a specific connotation in Greek philosophy. In the few hundred years before Christ, the Greeks had developed this idea of there being a sort of rationality behind the universe, some thing that is the foundation of all reality, that which is the source of all existence and meaning. They also called this the logos. When John calls Jesus the logos, this is likely what his Greek readers would have understood.
But there is a little more behind it. In Revelation, John also uses the title, calling Jesus the Word of God (Rev 19:13). That’s different from the term as used in Greek philosophy. For the Greeks, the logos just was. It wasn’t the logos of anything. So John doesn’t mean Jesus is the exact equivalent of the Greek logos. He is the Word of God.
So what does that mean? Let’s go back to the idea of a word. What is a word? It’s not easy to define concretely. A word can be a sound we make with our vocal cords and our tongue. It can be a particular arrangement of lines and shapes on a page, or another surface, or pixels on a screen. It can also be a series of taps or beeps in Morse Code. It could be a combination of 0s and 1s encoded into a computer. It can be a series of arm and hand gestures in sign language, or an arrangement of raised bumps on a surface. There’s almost no limit to the number of forms a “word” can be expressed in. But in all those forms, a “word” is a method by which one person conveys a message to another.
A word is a remarkably simple way to communicate considering its source. Ultimately, every word a human communicates originates in the human brain. Over 100 billion cells in our heads, all firing off chemical and electrical signals, with 100 trillion neural connections by which they travel. It’s an unbelievably complex structure, far more so than the most advanced machinery humans have ever built. About five years ago, it took one of the fastest supercomputers in the world (and by super, I mean this thing is like about 88,000 computers) about 40 minutes to simulate just 1 second of human brain activity. Even with the most advanced scientific instruments, it would be utterly impossible for anyone to decipher all the reactions going on in the brain. We could never translate it into any kind of personally meaningful form. At best, we can identify what parts of the brain correspond with emotions or physical functions, but we could never identify any kind of personal expression.
But there is a way to take all the reactions and processes and signals going on in this unbelievably complex structure in our heads and put them into a form that other people can understand: A word.
A word is amazing — it’s capable of taking these billions of these reactions and signals we could never understand, and putting them in a form we can understand. It puts them in a form where we can talk to one another, communicate with one another, actually get to know one another. And, again, I don’t just mean written or spoken language. I mean, as I said above, any method by which one person conveys a message to another. Only if we communicate with each other in ways we can understand can we truly know each other.
It’s the same with God. As hopelessly incapable as we are of understanding the human brain, we are infinitely less capable of understanding God. We can never understand God; he is far too complex and beyond our understanding. The only way we could ever understand him in any way is if he communicates with us in a form we can understand: in a word. And just like our words can take many forms — speech, writing, sounds, gestures, textures — God’s Word takes another form. As John 1:14 says, the Word became flesh.
Jesus was God in a form that we could understand. We can’t understand what perfect love is, or perfect justice, or perfect wisdom. That’s just incomprehensible to us. We can’t really understand anything about what God is like conceptually. But if we see a human being living out those characteristics, if we see how they actually look when a human being embodies those traits of God, then we can begin to understand. Then we can actually get to know God, because he communicates to us in his Word.
So that’s why Jesus is called the Word: because Jesus is God himself, expressing himself to us in a way that we can understand. When the people who lived with Jesus saw what he was like, they saw what God was like. They got to know God personally. And it wasn’t just limited to them, either. Now the accounts of how Jesus loved, how he forgave, how he reached out to people, how he taught and spoke, have been passed down to us in that ancient Book, so that we can get to know God as well.
