John 1:1-18
Jeremy Richards
isn't it absolutely
terrifyingly, shockingly
amazing
how words
those tiny little sounds
in this chemical-filled air
those shapeless weird marks
on stark white paper
can make or break
living breathing people
stab them at heart
without a single weapon
push them off
their strong firm feet
take away the earth
they used to stand on
words; they’re powerlessly powerful
so use yours
well [1]
Words “are powerlessly powerful.” Words “make or break living breathing people,” says Noor Unnahar, the author of this untitled poem.
I once heard a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor, preaching on James 3, where she said our words create worlds, like bubbles that float away from us, and once the worlds are created, we can’t change them, can’t take them back. They float on to their recipients. The worlds we create with our words can be beautiful and life-giving, or they can be ugly and violent. They can stab without a single weapon, Noor Unnahar says.
What kind of world would God’s Word create? We don’t have to guess, according to John’s Gospel. God’s Word created our world, created the universe, created earth and all that’s in it, created you and me and the squirrels that jump from tree branch to tree branch and the crows that fly by my window every morning and every evening, that Esther sees and yells, “Caw! Caw!” “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
What kind of world would God’s Word create? Our world. Which says, from the very beginning, that our world is good, that our bodies are good, that food and games and going swimming are good. Kicking a soccer ball, smelling flowers, making snow angels, all of its good. Going to work is good. Falling in love is good. Not falling in love is good, too.
Our reading this morning is John’s Christmas story. It begins not with the birth of Jesus, but with the birth of the cosmos. There are no angels, no shepherds, no Mary, no Joseph. John takes us back farther than that, to the beginning of time, to before time. “In the beginning,” John says, echoing the first words of Genesis, the first words of scripture, “was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” If we only had John’s Christmas story and not Matthew and Luke’s, the birth of Jesus might seem too abstract and theoretical. But if we only had Matthew and Luke’s birth narratives, we might misunderstand the cosmic scope of the birth of the Word, Emmanuel, God with us. It’s as if John’s account gives us the backstory, so we can truly understand the significance of the baby born in a manger and given the name Jesus.
In these first verses of John’s Gospel, he pulls together a number of threads and weaves them into one portrait: a portrait of Jesus Christ. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there’s a story about Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is, and Peter in a burst of inspiration proclaims, “You are the Messiah (the Christ), the Son of the living God.” John, in these first 18 verses, attempts to explain what that proclamation might mean. What does it mean when Peter says that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God? What does it mean when we say it? Do we really know what we’re confessing when we say “Jesus Christ”?
First, as I mentioned a minute ago, John draws on the creation story from Genesis, but with a twist. Like a movie where, in the end, there are flashbacks from earlier in the film, but the camera pans over and we see that one of the characters was present all along, previously just out of the frame. In the creation story, when God said, “Let there be light, let there be animals, let there be humans,” God’s “Word” was there too, just outside the frame, making it all happen. God said it, but the Word did it. And God’s Word was not simply a sound like your words and my words. God’s Word was God breaking the plane between spirit and matter, it was God personified, it was God acting and creating. At the beginning of all things was this Word, which was with God and was God.
Noor Unnahar says that our words can “take away the earth” a person used to stand on. But God’s Word established the earth, then drew us out of the earth, formed us in the image of God, breathed the breath of God into us, and gave us life.
There’re a number of other instances in the Old Testament where God’s Word is personified like this. More than just a sound, it acts and accomplishes things. In Isaiah 38:4, God’s word comes to Isaiah, like a messenger, and in Isaiah 55:11 God says, “my word…that goes out from my mouth…shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” The psalmist says in Psalm 107 that God “sent forth [God’s] word,” and God’s word “healed” the sick and suffering and “delivered them from destruction.” John is surely thinking of these passages and others like them when he refers to Jesus as the Word.
John is also drawing on Woman Wisdom from Proverbs 8, who says, “When [God] established the heavens, I was there, when [God] drew a circle on the face of the deep, when [God] made firm the skies above, when [God] established the fountains of the deep, when [God] assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress [God’s] command, when [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside [God], like a master worker; and I was daily [God’s] delight, rejoicing before [God] always, rejoicing in [God’s] inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” This Word was with God as Woman Wisdom, also called Sophia, who was with God as God’s “master worker.”
In addition to these Old Testament references, the Greek word John uses for Word, logos, in the Stoic philosophy of his day referred to a kind of cosmic reason, the mind of God, which structured and ordered the universe.[2]
John seems to imply all these meanings of “the Word” when he refers to Jesus as the Word in his prologue. Jesus is more than a good human, more, even, than a human with a special connection to God. Jesus Christ is God. He is the Word through which God created all things. He is the structure of the cosmos which holds all things together. Whenever God acts in history it is through this divine Word. We mean all that when we say Jesus is the Christ. When we offhandedly refer to Jesus as Jesus Christ, we’re making quite the claim.
Noor Unnahar warns us of the damage that human words can do. Words can be deadly. And she’s right of course, but John tells us there is a Word that gives life. The Word of God is the word of life, full of grace and truth, and “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” In receiving Jesus we receive his life. Just as Jesus is the Son of God, so we have become children of God. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God,” John says.
We can receive grace upon grace, John says, because “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
What kind of God would do such a thing? There were many heresies that came out of the early church claiming that God couldn’t really have taken on human form. God is too holy, too transcendent, too infinite to become earthy, limited, and knowable. Others said all material things are corrupt and temporal, only the spiritual is pure and eternal. How could God, who is eternal spirit, take on corrupt materialism?
Councils were convened, people were excommunicated, things got political, all over the identity of Jesus. Could Jesus really be fully human and fully God? Could God really be revealed in such a particular, historical person – a random Palestinian Jew who died the early, violent death of a criminal? Such a claim was offensive to the pious.
But the early church was shaped by scripture, as we are shaped by scripture, and they returned again and again to passages like the one we read today, or Colossians 1, which says “In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. God delights in creation, delights in us. God delights in you. God wants to be near us. God moves toward us, God searches for us, as a woman looking for a lost coin or a shepherd looking for a lost sheep. In Jesus, God initiates our reconciliation by becoming incarnate in the world. All of this happens because of God’s infinite, inexhaustible love for us. God was pleased to do so. This is the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
This confession we make, that Jesus is the Christ, isn’t something we can fully comprehend. It’s a mystery. It’s difficult to hold his humanity and his divinity in tension. We’re tempted to stress one or the other.
If we overly-prioritize his humanity, he becomes a really good person we can look up to, learn from, and try to emulate, but he no longer acts in the world now. His power lies solely in what he did then. He isn’t the Word. He’s just another person. If that’s the case, there’s no grace upon grace to receive from him, there’s no fullness to draw from. He isn’t present to us or to the world. We’re on our own.
On the other hand, if we overly-stress his divinity, he becomes a powerful spiritual reality which shapes our lives in the present, but he’s always out there, up there in the sky, coming down to us during our times of prayer maybe, but we miss him in the faces of humanity – family, friends, strangers, and enemies alike. We miss him in the midst of the creation that depends every second upon him, because he is the source of all life. “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
We can’t allow this to happen, especially not right now, as the climate is in crisis and our own country may be on the verge of war. This is no time to overly-spiritualize Christ. From the very beginning, God was present in the material world. The Word became flesh and dwelled among us, lived a fully human life, confronted political and religious powers, healed physical illnesses, and addressed social concerns.
The only way we know God is through God’s action in history, and God acted most decisively in Jesus, so we can’t separate Jesus Christ from the world he created, the world he became incarnate in. And, at the same time, we can’t reduce Jesus only to who he was in history, or we’ll miss the cosmic scope of his identity, which John wants to make clear to us in our reading this morning.
Today is the first Sunday of the month, and as such its Communion Sunday. I’ve been reading a book called The Spirit of Early Christian Though by the scholar Robert Louis Wilken. The book is about how early Christian thought and practice developed, and from the early days, Communion, or the Eucharist, stood at the center of the Early Church’s worship. Wilken says that before taking Communion, the liturgy that the churches followed would recount God’s saving work in history, first through Israel, and then through Jesus. By doing so, the church acknowledged that “God’s fullest revelation came through historical events.”[3] And yet, he says, something more was at work. Communion wasn’t simply a retelling of the old story, it was, above all, “a celebration of the presence of the living Christ.”[4] The Early Church also used the word “remember” in their liturgy, just as we do, but Wilkin explains that their word for remember meant to “recall by making present.”[5]
When we partake of Communion, we remember what Jesus did then and bring it into our present now so that we can have a hope and a vision for the future, rooted in the person of Jesus Christ, who the bread and the cup represent.
Physical elements, like bread and wine (or grape juice J) are a gateway into mystery, just as the historical Jesus was the gateway into the heart of the eternal God. “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,” John says. The spiritual is known, is touched, through the physical. We meet the Creator in creation, because God is pleased to dwell with us in creation. “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Noor Unnahar, yesterday i was the moon, 65.
[2] Francis Taylor Gench, Encounters with Jesus, 3.
[3] Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 33.
[4] Ibid 31.
[5] Ibid 34.