Isaiah gives you a body first: feet on mountains, a runner crossing hard terrain with news that changes the nervous system. Peace and salvation aren’t ideas; they arrive as breathless report, and the city’s “watchmen” answer with a synchronized relief—eye to eye, finally, because the threat-response can stand down. The “holy arm” bared before the nations is the public end of hiding, the moment a people stops whispering its hope. John takes that messenger-energy and drives it inward to the structure of reality. “Word” is the intelligibility of things, the pattern that makes chaos readable, and it is personal. Light doesn’t argue with darkness; it simply shows what is there, and the tragedy is not hostility but non-recognition: the world runs on meaning and still fails to know meaning when it appears in a human face. “His own received him not” reads like the most intimate psychological wound: familiarity turning into blindness. The pivot is the sentence that refuses spiritualization: the Word becomes flesh and “dwells” among us. Meaning accepts limitation, texture, fatigue, misunderstanding; the cure is not escape but incarnation. John the witness is the necessary secondary figure—healthy ego that points away from itself—because humans often need a voice they trust before they can tolerate the light. Semina Verbi: the Logos here resonates, speculatively, with Stoic Logos as the rational fire ordering the cosmos, and with the Dao in Daoism as the way that underlies and generates forms, though John insists that this ordering principle takes a particular human life. Isaiah’s watchmen seeing “eye to eye” echoes the Buddhist image of awakening as clear seeing, and the desert rejoicing recalls Hindu bhakti where the world itself becomes capable of praise. The messenger on the mountains has kin in Zoroastrian good tidings of truth over the Lie, and in Islamic imagery of revelation as guidance and light, though John’s claim is that the light is not merely sent; it is the source come near.