The first day of the rest of your life, a devotional thought

There's a fascinating sequence in the first chapter of the Gospel of John that often gets overlooked but is worth far more reflection than it usually gets. It’s right at the beginning of the gospel; we’ve just come through the Prologue (1:1-18) which talks about Jesus being “the word of God” that was there “in the beginning” and by which God created “all things that have been made.” Then it goes on to talk about Jesus as the life that was the “light of all mankind” that was “coming into the world.” As I often point out when I teach Bible studies on the Gospel of John, any 1st Century Christian reader worth their salt would recognize all of this as creation imagery lifted right out of Genesis. 

In other words, John’s telling a New Creation story, or rather: God has told one in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. 

So far so good, but then in John 1:29 you have this nondescript reference to “the next day.” You have to count, here, but when you do, something wonderful comes into focus: if 1:29 is “the next day,” that would mean that 1:19-29, where John the Baptist predicts the coming of Jesus was “the first day.” So 1:29-34 is the “second day” you might say. Then in 1:35 you get a reference to “the next day again,” making 1:35-42, where Jesus calls his first disciples, “day 3.” Another day (the next day...) begins at 1:43, when Jesus calls two more disciples. Then, in 2:1, where we have his first miraculous sign, the water into wine, we’re told it occurs “three days later.” In other words: the turning of water into wine, by which he “reveals his glory” (2:11), occurs on the 7th day after the introductory prologue that marked this book out as a New Creation story.

If I’ve done the math here correctly, that would mean, in essence, that 1:19-2:1 symbolically marks off, the “first week” of this New Creation story, a sequence of seven days reminiscent of the creation week in Genesis 1. And if I’ve done the exegesis right here, that would mean that the calling of the disciples (1:35-50) is part of the creative work that God’s doing, to bring this New Creation to its fullness in Christ. 

Who knew, that when you were called to be a follower of Jesus, God was doing there and then a Creative Work, something like what he did when he made the sun and the moon and the sea and everything in it, way back in the beginning? Follower of Jesus, welcome to the first day of a whole new world!