A
Polish woman once shared this story with Winston Churchill’s grandson:
I was a girl of just twelve, living in the Ghetto at the
time of the Uprising as the Nazi storm-troopers were attacking us to take us to
concentration camps. Whenever your grandfather broadcast over the BBC we
would all crowd around the radio. I could not understand English but I
knew that if my family and I were to have any hope of coming through this war,
it depended entirely on this strong, unseen voice that I could not understand.[1]
That story says something to
me about the power of the word, even a word we may not understand at first.
That is what our Gospel reading for today is all about from John 1:1-18. Listen
for God’s word to you…
In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not
one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the
light of all people. The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God, whose name
was John. He came as a witness to
testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the
light. The true light, which
enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came
into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did
not accept him. But to all who received
him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of
the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among
us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I
said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came
through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God.
It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
In the first three verses and
in the fourteenth verse of the opening chapter of his Gospel, John tells us
five key things about the word. First, he tells us that the word existed in
the beginning. This recalls for us the opening verse of Genesis by which
every Jew would have known that book: “In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)
Then, in verse 17, John
identifies the word, the logos (in Greek), with Jesus. This suggests that
Jesus, or more properly, the Son of God, existed before he was born as a baby
in Bethlehem. In fact, his existence goes all the way back to the beginning,
before creation itself. As St. Athanasius said, “…there never was when he was
not.” However far back we go, the Son of God is always there.
When novelist Lloyd C.
Douglas was a university student, he lived in a boarding house. Downstairs on
the first floor was an elderly, retired music teacher who was infirm and unable
to leave his apartment.
Douglas said that every
morning they had a ritual they would go through together. He would come down
the steps, open the old man’s door, and ask, “Well, what’s the good news?”
The old man would pick up his
tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair, and say, “That’s Middle C!
It was Middle C yesterday; it will be Middle C tomorrow; it will be Middle C a
thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the
hall is out of tune, but my friend, that is Middle C!”[2]
That old man had discovered
one thing upon which he could depend, one constant reality in his life, “the still point of the turning world”, to quote
T. S. Eliot.
John is telling us that the
Word, the Son of God, is really that “still point of the turning world”. He is
the one absolute of which there is no shadow of turning. The Word existed in
the beginning. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The second thing John
tells us about the Word, the Logos, is that it was with God. Now this statement identifies Jesus, the Son of God,
as a distinct person. In some sense Jesus is alongside of God. We have in this
statement one of the earliest expressions of the doctrine of the Trinity. And
yet, John is telling us that there has always been the closest, most intimate
connection between the Word, Jesus, and God. That means no one can tell us what
God is like, what God’s will is for us, what God’s love and heart and mind are
like, as Jesus can.
There are no human analogies
adequate to describe the relationship between Jesus, the Word, and God the
Father. But try this analogy on for size anyway…
If we want to know what
someone really thinks and feels about something, and if we can’t approach the
person ourselves, then the best thing we can do is go to a person who knows
that person the best. A person’s closest, most intimate friend, one who has
known him the longest, will be best able to interpret that person’s heart and
mind to us.
The relationship between God
the Son and God the Father is something like that. Jesus has always been with
God. Therefore, Jesus is the one person in all the universe who can best reveal
to us who God really is and what God wants to do for us and in us and through
us. Jesus gives us a 20/20 vision of God.
The third important thing
John tells us is that Jesus, the Word, the Logos, was God. Literally, John says, “and God was the Word.” John is
telling us in unmistakable terms that Jesus is God. He has just told us that
Jesus is a distinct person in the Godhead, but he is still a member of the
Godhead; Jesus is God, he shares the very essence of deity.
Again, there is no perfect
human analogy to the Trinity because the Trinity is beyond our comprehension
and is one of a kind. But one very childlike analogy that has been used is that
of an apple. An apple has a core, it has the flesh (the bulk of the apple which
we like to eat, and an apple has a skin. The skin, the flesh, and the core all
share in the essence of “appleness”, but each is also distinct.
God the Father, The Word, and
The Holy Spirit all share in the essence of deity, but each is a distinct
person. John has told us that the Word is God, but also distinct from God, that
is, from God the Father.
An analogy to the Trinity
that I like even better is this one… St. Augustine said that God the Father is
the lover, Jesus is the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the love between them.
Or there is this third
analogy. St. Gregory Nazianzus taught that the Trinity is like a Great Dance.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit have hands joined in a circle and are constantly
dancing around one another. And we are invited to join in the dance.
Well, whichever analogy you
like best, John makes the deity of the Word even clearer in his next statement.
John says that through the Word “all things were made; without him nothing was
made that has been made.” (John 1:3) In other words, the Word, Jesus, was
intimately involved in creation. This is the fourth thing John tells us
about the Word.
The writer to the Hebrews put
it this way: “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at
many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by
his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the
universe.” (Hebrews 1:1-2) It is not as though God the Father was the only
member of the Trinity involved in creating the world. No, the Son was involved
in creating as well. And the Spirit was there, Genesis tells us, brooding over
the waters of creation.
In creation we begin to see
the great power of the Word expressed. Have you ever wondered how much power it
would take to make a world? My father sat down to figure it out one day using
Einstein’s formula, E=MC2. Here is what he wrote about that experiment…
Following
Einstein’s formula, if we take two and two-tenths pounds of matter (a kilogram)
and we reduce it to fragments, or as we say until our chain of fission is
complete, we will end up with 25 billion kilowatt hours of energy, which is equivalent,
approximately, to the total output of all of our power sources in the whole of
the United States operating at peak efficiency 24 hours a day for 60 days.
Of
course the reverse of this then would be true in determining how much energy it
would take to bring into existence a kilogram of matter. Again it would take 25
billion kilowatt hours of energy.
The
world in which we live weighs 6.5 septillion tons. Then to determine the
kilowatt hours of energy necessary to bring into existence a world you would
multiply 6.5 septillion tons by 25 billion. This then would give us in kilowatt
hours the energy necessary to bring into existence a world.
The
question then is where you can get that much energy, even if you used all of
the power sources in the whole of the world, operating these at peak
efficiency, 24 hours a day, including not only the power plants as sources of
energy but all of our working atomic piles. Work all of these peak efficiency
24 hours a day for 20 billion years, even then you only have a fraction of
energy necessary to bring into existence a world.
That’s
why I like the way in which this is expressed in the Old Testament. “God spoke
and the worlds were formed.” Or in other words, God expressed His power and the
worlds were formed.
And John tells us that the
power that created the world and the far-flung galaxies of the universe is
contained in the Word, the Logos, who is Jesus Christ.
Finally, the
fifth thing John tells us is that the Word became flesh. The same Word, through whom the universe
was created, became flesh. John doesn’t simply say that he became human, or a
body. John uses the Greek word “sarx”. This refers to humanity in all of its
frailty and vulnerability.
John tells us that
the Word became flesh. The Word did not give up being the
Word by becoming flesh. Jesus did not give up deity by being born as a babe in
Bethlehem. No, he is still fully God and, since his conception in the womb of
the Virgin Mary, he is fully human. Once he became human, there was no going
back.
Mystery writer,
Dorothy Sayers, said this of the Incarnation…
…
from the beginning of time until now it is the only thing which has ever really
happened… We may call this doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating,
we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish… but if we call it dull
then what in heaven’s name is worthy to be called exciting?
Now, I know that
some people have a hard time accepting the idea of the Incarnation. The story
is told of a Hindu man who could not believe in Christianity because he could
not contemplate a God who would so humble himself as to become human. Then one
day the Hindu came upon an anthill. He tried to get close enough to the anthill
to study it, but every time he bent low, his shadow caused all the ants to scurry
away. This Hindu man recognized that the only way in which he could ever come
to really know that colony of ants would be if he could somehow become an ant
himself. And that was the moment at which his conversion to Christianity began.
I believe that God
became human in Jesus of Nazareth in order to communicate himself to us. If you
have a hard time believing that, here is what I would challenge and invite you
to do. Go home and begin reading the Gospel of John for yourself. And as you
read it, pray something like this: “God, if you are real, reveal yourself to me
through this book.” Try it and see what happens…
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