Alison Knight, Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Bible and Antiquity in 19th-Century Culture project at the University of Cambridge, writes here about a seventeenth-century sermon on this verse.

On December 25, 1611, Lancelot Andrewes preached a sermon on John 1:14 to James I at Whitehall. He opens with a surprising comparison: the verse is, to Andrewes, like an eagle’s flight. Just as St John is the eagle of the four evangelists, and just as John’s gospel is, like the eagle, “wonderfully high,” this verse inscribes the mystery of incarnation in John’s characteristically aquiline manner. Andrewes explains that

the nature of the Eagle is, by GOD himselfe, described (Iob 39.) by two properties, elevari ad ardua, no foule vnder heaven towreth so high: and vbicunque fuerit cadaver statim adest; None so soone or so sodainly downe vpon the bodie, as he. Both these do lively expresse themselues in Saint Iohn…as an Eagle in the clouds, he first mounteth wonderfully high, beyond MOSES and his In principio, with an higher In principio then it; beyond Genesis and the worlds Creation: That the Word was then with GOD and was GOD. This may well be termed the Eagles flight; so exceedingly high, as the cleerest eye hath much adoe, to follow him. Yet, so farr as they can follow him, the very Philosophers have been driven, to admire the penning of this Gospell. But after this, as an Eagle againe…downe he commeth directly, from the height of heaven, and lights vpon the body of His flesh, the mysterie of His incarnation

(XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), p. 44)

The swift movement of John’s language, with its dizzying expression of complex incarnation theology within so few words, becomes for Andrewes like the blinding flash of an eagle’s dive to earth. As his sermon progresses, he attempts to arrest that flight, teasing out the theological distinctions inscribed in the verse in characteristic Andrewes fashion. We see his punning wordplay as he argues against heretical Manichean, Cerinthian, Valentinian, and Nestorian interpretations of the verse (“Manicheus holding that he had noe true body: as if, factum had been fictum, or making were mocking”); as the sermon draws to a close, he makes a typical association between this verse’s incarnational verbum caro factum est and the hoc est corpus meum of the Eucharist; and throughout, the manifold meaning inscribed in the words word, made, flesh are scrutinised from every angle. Andrewes’s striking simile, that this scriptural verse is like an eagle’s flight, is not revisited, but through it he represents scripture and “the Word made flesh” as an active, moving textual force.