Manna wasn't bread.
It was "What on earth?" (A creative rendering of "Ma na?", "ma" being "what?" and "na" being, to this day in modern Hebrew, a particle reinforcing the previous word).
It was unprecedented ("which your fathers never knew").
God gave it so they'd learn they didn't exist thanks to bread. (Which is why it wasn't bread; that was the whole point. God didn't, after all, give them bread from heaven so they'd learn they didn't need bread. Which would make no sense.)
But, instead, they lived by everything issuing from God's mouth (the word "word" isn't even there in the Hebrew; just "...but by what issues from the mouth of God").
The obvious metaphorical image is that the manna, the "What is this?", that came down from heaven, came as it were from the mouth of God. It didn't really, of course (though in an ultimate sense everything has issued from the Word in God's "mouth"), but the image is clearly suggested by the language. It's a bit of a play on words, poetic and vivid in the Hebrew.
All of this reminder about the manna in the desert is in the context of God's command, on the eve of entry into the Promised Land, to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart...."
Moses practically begs the people, "Listen, Israel!", as if he's saying "Pleeeeez! Do this!", knowing that...they won't.
God calls for "khesed" from the people.
Hebrew "khesed" is an untranslatable word.
("Untranslatable word" doesn't mean "a word that you can't translate in some way, in specific contexts"--there are no such words in any language; you can always convey what it means, with a phrase, or with various words in various contexts and connotations. But "untranslatable word" means "a single word with a range of connotations that no single word in the second language encompasses"; so we don't have one word in English, or in Russian, that does what khesed does in Hebrew. Like, for instance, there's no single word in Russian that can cover all the meanings English "hang" does: hang up, hang a killer, hang out with friends, hang from the edge, hang in there, hang on, hang loose....)
But what the broad concept khesed conveys is, in a phrase (which is generally what you have to do with untranslatable words), "total and unwavering commitment to do absolutely everything for the good of the one loved." That's the conceptual nugget in the Hebrew mind that gets sounded when he utters "khesed". If you asked him what "khesed" meant, of course, he'd simply say "Khesed means khesed!" Just like we'd say "Hang means hang!"
God requires this khesed, and also emet (truth, not dry factuality but inter-personal truth as in "true to his convictions" or "Romeo remained true to Juliet") from Israel.
"Khesed v' emet" are a well-known duo in the Hebrew scriptures ( v' means "and".) They rarely appear without each other. It would be like Laurel without Hardy, George without Gracie, Brick without a-Brack. Together they sum up the summit of the divine-human ideal. It doesn't get any better.
Nearly all translations water it down, because we are stuck having to make an "X and X" phrase to mirror khesed v' emet. But since there's no single word, really, that conveys the full force of "khesed" or for that matter of "emet," any translation is doomed to water down the sense, the implication, of the phrase. Love and faithfulness, mercy and truth, they're serviceable translations but not of course really it. Any simple "X and X" equivalent you try to finagle in English is doomed to obscure nearly as much as it illuminates.
"How about mercy and truth? So like, forgiving people who wrong me, and...um, telling the truth?"
Well, er...no, though that all goes into it inevitably, but...no.
"Love and faithfulness? So we should love God and be faithful to Him?"
Well, no--er, I mean YES, of course! But, while that's probably a better handling of khesed v' emet, it's still not quite it.
There is, after all, a real Hebrew word for "love" and if the author had merely wanted to say "love" he'd have used it, but he used khesed instead, so it's still something, well...other. And "faithfulness" does indeed express the inter-personal nuance of emet better than "truth", yet even criminals can be "faithful" to each other without their faithfulness being rooted in what's universally the good, faithful, life-giving TRUTH. So their faithfulness to each other turns out to be not emet but something pernicious and ultimately self-serving.
"Then how about 'commitment and loyalty'?"
Also pretty good, but...dry, no passion, too abstract. Plus, couldn't you see "loyalty" in khesed just as much as in emet? And "commitment" in emet as much as in khesed? So aren't we blurring the two terms into each other?
You see the difficulties.
The khesed v' emet concept was so fundamental and theologically central to the whole divine revelation that the NT writers couldn't possibly just leave it in the OT. They had to demonstrate how it came into its fullness, like everything else in God's revelation, in Christ.
And in Greek yet!
And what Greek phrase did they use to translate khesed v' emet?
Or to cut to the chase, how did their Greek phrase finally come through to us in English?
Grace and truth.
As in "For God gave the law through Moses, but grace and truth came about through Jesus Christ" (which is the sense of the Greek in John 1:17).
There is something intrinsically wrong in what seems to be people's customary take on John 1:17. We assume it to mean, in a neat, unthreatening symmetrical way, that on the one hand God gave us the law, through Moses, but on the other hand He gave us grace and truth, through Jesus. "Grace" being "unmerited favor", essentially a synonym here for "salvation", and "truth" being...well, let's say the Gospel, the true message that the grace comes through.
I'd say that's how most Christians sum up the verse, wouldn't you?
And it's so wrong.
John's assertion is actually explosively asymmetrical, and the more you reflect on it the more astounding it gets.
First of all, the "giving" only shows up once in the statement: God gave the law. There's no "giving", not even of a superior kind, on the other side of the assertion, because there's no symmetry.
In the second part, "grace and truth" happened, came about, arose--the sense of the Greek verb is flexible, but in general it indicates something that wasn't there before being there--through Jesus Christ.
So while Moses is merely a channel, Jesus Christ is the one actually materializing grace and truth, realizing it in Himself, as part of Himself, the essence of Who He is.
Secondly, the "law" is an object, something God could, indeed, "give" via Moses. The giving of the law, by the way, was itself an act of khesed, properly understood (which points out how incorrectly limited our theological perception of "grace" is, because we have simplistically reduced it to some kind of "thing" that is the opposite of "law" and that God somehow uses to save us).
But (and here's comes the main event) while the giving of the thing called the law was (like everything God does) an act of khesed, what the whole law aims at was still screamingly absent. I.e., the Man of Khesed v' Emet, who incarnates to the final degree, inside and out, the total love of Deuteronomy 6:4. (The phrase khesed v emet itself isn't in Deut. 6:4 but it's a continual theme in the Hebrew scriptures that Deut. 6:4 is inseparable from.)
In John 1:17, John is telling us that Jesus became that. The Man of Khesed. In Him it happened.
In Jesus, for the first time ever, Man rendered God absolute "grace and truth." A Man enfleshed Deuteronomy 6:4.
That's the part that turns our usual orthodox New Testament thinking on its head.
"Wait, Man can't give God grace! Grace is unmerited favor that saves us! So it's impossible in every way for humans to give God grace!"
Which is an objection that says positively nothing about the the text and everything about the warping of the term through our narrow "orthodox evangelical NT" mental filters.
Saying that "grace is unmerited favor" is the same as saying "to drink means to imbibe alcohol" because that's what people mean when they say, "Oh...Frank. Yes, well, you know...he drinks." It may be what "drink" conveys in that sentence, but "drink" itself does not mean "imbibe alcohol." By the same token, "grace" in the full biblical sense will certainly manifest "unmerited favor" and it is certainly the divine "mode" (dreadfully weak word but it will have to do) in which He saves us. But "grace" itself cannot be reduced to those things simply because those things spring from it.
It is an outcome of our artificial pigeon-holing of the concept into comfortably predictable "New Testament" categories, our effective parodying of the term/concept, just as we parody "drinking" if we conclude it only means tippling booze, that we arrive at the biblically preposterous conviction that "grace" is a "thing" that only God can, as it were, hand to Man.
Wrong.
Man certainly can give/show God "grace/khesed". God demands it again and again in the Old Testament. That we show khesed to Him and to each other. Together with (it's a package deal) unwavering faithfulness (emet).
The apostle John certainly knew this. He knew Hebrew. And he knew Jesus.
So when John describes Jesus as the one in whom this quality , this kind of life (not a "thing") manifested itself in full, he is saying something light-years beyond a simple, "First God gave us this, then He gave us that."
He is pointing to Jesus as a Mount Everest that makes the magnificent thing God did through Moses look like a speed bump by comparison. Or if you prefer to liken the giving of the Law to Everest, then we must liken the materialization of khesed v emet in Jesus to the entire universe. John is unveiling the audacious asymmetry, with no apologies, of God's worlds-shattering deed in Christ.
Finally, in Jesus, God got the Man He wanted. The khesed v emet were channeled, before all else, from the Son to the Father. God incarnate enfleshed the perfection of Deut. 6:4.
Only because Jesus was the "God-gracing" Man that Adam was created to be was He concomitantly the Lamb, with khesed so infinitely overflowing that it swallowed up everybody else who was willing to jump in and go wherever it took them. (Which is a different sort of way to formulate, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life....")
Which is what the "For" is there for. As in..."For of His fullness have we all received, and khesed upon khesed..." Of course, John has to use a Greek word there, kharis, to convey what he's thinking. What was in Him was an overflowing bounty of human-divine perfection--in love's uttermost consecration--that it flooded us all.
It is terribly significant that this assertion comes before the more "famous" and evangelistically handy one about God giving the law through Moses but grace and truth...etc. If you hear John's text as some dry theological lecture, you miss the whole spirit of it disastrously. It is bubbling with spontaneity and excitement. And if you take it as a dry theological exposition you cannot possibly "feel' why the sentences are in the order they are.
I'll offer an analogy to argue my case.
Consider this account: Henry is a very kind and generous man. One day in the city he noticed his next door neighbor's children on a street corner crying. He went up and asked what was wrong. They told him they had lost their phone and money. Henry immediately gave them a hundred dollars and let them borrow his phone for the rest of the day.
When the children got home later they said:
"We're home! We're fine!"
(Parents think: "What? Why wouldn't you be?")
"We had a phone and all the money we needed!"
("Well, of course you did, because we gave them to you!")
"Because Henry gave us his phone and money!"
("What? What on earth do you mean?")
"Because we lost ours!"
("What?")
"But it was all right because Henry saw us and helped us!"
("Thank God!")
"Henry is such a nice man!"
("He sure is! We owe him a dinner!")
"Oh, and you owe Henry a hundred dollars."
("WHAT?!")
And in the children's spontaneous telling, the entire presupposition of the tale, i.e., that Henry is a nice, generous man, without which none of the rest would have happened, gets told last, or nearly last.
Which is, of course, even if the children weren't conscious of it, a very clever way of grabbing somebody's attention, i.e., by rattling off the outcomes before you've explicated the causes. Professional public speakers do the same. "Out of the mouth of babes...."
What John is saying in 1:14-18 is, in a dry (though considering the magnificent content it can never really be dry), logical, linear fashion, the following:
- Only God the Son is privy to the inner glory of the Father, but the Son has made the Father known to us by becoming flesh, human, and living among us, so that we could actually see this Father-Son glory (if limitedly).
- Unlike the mere giving of the law, the Son materialized the Law's vision. That is, the Son overflowed with human-divine perfection, the summit of holy, unblemished, fierce love for God and Man.
- This is what John the Baptist was talking about when he said the one coming after him was greater (to say the least!).
- And the miraculous bottom line is that we've been engulfed, swept up, practically as collateral beneficiaries, in this uncontainable explosion of khesed, love, perfection, fulfillment.
But John, in an appealingly youthful...or very clever...kind of spontaneity, says this almost entirely backwards, in reverse, so that the whole picture's logical premise is at the end, verse 18. You can follow the thread rather neatly if you start there and go backwards.
Which is the way children breathlessly tell you something they're excited about, forcing you to extract the logical precedents from them with a series of "Why?"s.
On the other hand, John, being very much a Jew, doesn't tell his tale simply backwards. There is clearly an element of what literary types call "inclusio", where the same thought "book-ends" a passage, showing up at the beginning and the end. And when you stop to think about it, isn't John in 1:18 saying intrinsically the same thing, in different words, that he does in 1:1? And 1:18 is obviously the end of the theological prologue before John starts the detailed narrative. So that could be taken as an inclusio.
There is also the possibility of something more than inclusio going on here. Though I'm not going to investigate it further here, there could be a chiasm going on, maybe multiple chiasms interwoven. A "chiasm" is when the writer repeats much the same thought first and last, then the next thought second and second-to-last, the next thought third and third from last, etc. Until you get a kind of A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B-A conceptual structure in the text. This way of story-telling was deeply ingrained in Hebrew culture, perhaps for all I know throughout ancient Near Eastern cultures.
To sum up, then, I'll say it again: God got the Man He wanted, FINALLY. ("This is My Son, in Whom I am well pleased.") And for that one thing alone, everything is now completely different. God's joy was fulfilled, and in precisely Him Who fulfilled it we are home, safe, restored. God never did anything like that before. It was unprecedented, like manna, unimaginable, direct from "the mouth of God"--the Word, the Bread of Life.
(Imagine therefore Jesus' pain when the people alluded to the manna, wrongly calling it "bread" by the way, which warped the whole meaning of it, in an attempt to coerce Jesus into performing miracles for their entertainment. They got the whole point 180 degrees backwards.)
That, I'm convinced, is the "vision" of John 1:17 and, of course, the entire Gospel and New Testament. God got the Man He wanted. It happened. Finally.
This is a radically different vision, one inexpressibly transcending the wooden, barren symmetry supposed by many Christians in the hollow, theologically eviscerating interpretation that "First God gave us the Law, but then He gave us salvation and the Gospel because the Law couldn't save us. He did the first through Moses and the second through Jesus." I hope you can hear, given the case I have laid out above, how hollow that rings.
