The Word Made Flesh

"The Word Made Flesh"

John 1:1-18
January 3, 2010

1-2 The Word was first,
    the Word present to God,
    God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
    in readiness for God from day one.
3-5Everything was created through him;
    nothing—not one thing!—
    came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
    and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
    the darkness couldn't put it out.

6-8There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-
Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself
the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.

9-13The Life-Light was the real thing:
    Every person entering Life
    he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
    the world was there through him,
    and yet the world didn't even notice.
He came to his own people,
    but they didn't want him.
But whoever did want him,
    who believed he was who he claimed
    and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
    their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
    not blood-begotten,
    not flesh-begotten,
    not sex-begotten.
14The Word became flesh and blood,
    and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
    the one-of-a-kind glory,
    like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
    true from start to finish.

15John pointed him out and called, "This is the One! The One I told you was coming
after me but in fact was ahead of me. He has always been ahead of me, has always
had the first word."

16-18We all live off his generous bounty,
    gift after gift after gift.
We got the basics from Moses,
    and then this exuberant giving and receiving,
This endless knowing and understanding—
    all this came through Jesus, the Messiah.
No one has ever seen God,
    not so much as a glimpse.
This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,
    who exists at the very heart of the Father,
    has made him plain as day.

This Sunday I want to continue the journey from the story about Jesus’ childhood
encounter with the rabbis in the Temple by preaching from this text, this most unusual
of texts, one that has been a favorite of mine for years. I actually chose to put in
Eugene’s Peterson’s version of it in our bulletin today, from his popular version of the
Bible called The Message so that we could hear it differently, so that those words that
have become so familiar to us didn’t become too familiar that we lost sight of such an
amazing moment in Scripture. The reason why it’s such a wonderfully beguiling and
touching text is that it is unlike anything else in Scripture—there is an esoteric edge to
it, one that is grounded clearly in the Greek and Gnostic culture of its time, while still
staying true to the larger Biblical witness. If you think about, it’s the New Testament
version of the Jewish creation story, the one we are so familiar with from the book of
Genesis. “In the beginning…” it says, as if the whole world were being re-created
again, as God began from scratch all over again. Keep in mind that the writer of John
is clearly influenced by the esoteric religions that were all around him, and the Greek
and Roman philosophers that were the tour de force of the time. He recasts his
understanding of Jesus in such a way as to appeal to the religious competitors of his
day, while also staying true to his understanding of the Jewish religion that gave birth to
Christianity. It’s a strange and beautiful thing that we have before us this morning,
straddling two worlds, in ways that no other Biblical text really does.

And what is so amazing and wondrous about it is that, in my opinion, it is both oddly
grounded, while also feeling oddly otherworldly—I mean, it’s an emotionally satisfying
text in the sense that it tells us that this Word, this Christ, walked amongst us, and yet
was not quite us, which is what this whole idea of the incarnation is saying—that Jesus
was who God is, and that if you want to know who God is like, who God really is, look to
the life of Jesus, to see what and who God really cares for in this world. This text has
often been the lynchpin of the doctrine of the Trinity, which essentially arose in the third
century in an effort to explain who this Jesus was in relationship to the Father, and to
this Spirit that Jesus and others often speak of. It’s a messy thing, this idea of the
Trinity, messy because of the division it has caused the church, the heartbreak that the
church universal, in its quest for doctrinal purity, the damage it’s done to the reputation
of the church, sometimes known more for its willingness to kill and excommunicate each
other over disagreements about who this Jesus really was than anything else.

And the sad thing, really, is that this text really doesn’t do much in terms of explaining
anything, and perhaps does more to add to the mystery of who Jesus was and how his
life, death and resurrection are to be interpreted. Now, I know this all pretty wearisome
stuff for some of you—I know that most folks are not into complicated arguments over
the meaning of Jesus’ life—I get that. So, I’m not going to get into some of complexities
of this text, because, frankly, it would probably bore both of us to tears. But there are
two parts of this text that I want to do a bit of commentary on, the first of which is that
piece that goes: The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn't put it
out. In the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates it this way: The light
shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. I love that piece of this
text, this reminder that the darkness cannot win, will never win, despite the fact that it so
often feels as if we live in especially dark times.

You see, during and after Christmas a lot of people struggle with depression and
darkness in their lives—a literal darkness because of how early the light dissipates
during this time of the year, but also an emotional and spiritual darkness that falls over
them. This is the time of year when our losses—losses of friends and families, losses
of jobs and stability—seem to be more accented. If the Christmas season is about
reconnecting with family, then the absence of those family and friends become far more
apparent, and if this is the season when we are supposed to be buying for our children
and friends, but we’ve got no money because we’ve got no job, well, you get why this
can be a hard season to keep up the façade of everything just being OK. We have
“blue Christmas” services during this time of the year because the days can become
blue for those who are struggling with loss. When I was a single person, which was a
lot during my twenties, I remember how difficult Christmases could be, because I could
rarely get home to family because of my job as a minister, and it sometimes felt
awkward rolling out the Christmas decorations for just me. I rarely put up a tree during
that time, until I just decided one year that I just wanted to do it, family or no family,
spouse or no spouse.

And yet, in this text from John, using language of light and darkness, says that even
during the times when the darkness feels the deepest, the darkness will not win, and
light will overcome the shadows. And I think the reasons why I find those words so
comforting and so powerful is because, frankly, deep in my heart, I often wonder if that
is actually true or not, whether or not, in the end, the light will actually win, because,
dog-gone-it, there are sure plenty of times when it seems as if the darkness is indeed
winning and world is become more and more shrouded with the curtain of night. My fear
is that the light won’t win, something that haunts me in my most cynical moments.
When I was in college, I took a lot of courses on the Nazi Holocaust, the horrifying
murder of Jews, gypsies, religious dissidents, both Protestant and Catholic, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, and homosexual men, and after perhaps dwelling too deeply in those
shadows, your mind and spirit get a bit cynical about human nature, and the deep
shadow places that exist in the human heart, and can be so easily manipulated. I often
try to remind people that the Germany of the thirties and forties was no backward
country—in fact, Germany in the nineteenth century produced some of the greatest
philosophers, musicians, poets, and theologians the world has ever seen, and so we
must remember that the world can go crazy, and madness can set in, in any time and
any place, even in this country, if certain accidents and mistakes of history are
repeated. I remember a good friend of mine pushing back at me about that idea, a
good friend of mine in seminary, that what happened there could never be repeated,
but then Rwanda happened a few years later, and then the genocides in Bosnia, both
of which experienced their own moments of communal, murderous madness in the late
nineties, and I don’t think I sounded so crazy to my friend anymore.

Still, the problem with being a student of such a horrifying part of human history like the
Holocaust is that it skews your perception, just like dwelling on all that has been loss
during seasons like Christmas can skew your perception of the world. I mean, there is
no doubt that there is shadow in this world—I mean, even the Christmas story carries
within it the horrible tale of the slaughter of the babies in Bethlehem in Herod’s mad
attempt to squash any potential challenger, even one embodied in a child—but the
shadows are not all there is, and its texts like this one that remind us that there is more
light than darkness in this world, and though there are moments in our lives and in the
world when it seems as if all hope and light will be lost, it never is, the light of the world,
no matter how battered by the night, the light simply never, never finally goes out, dim
though it may be some time.

Last week, I did a small, informal service for a young man who killed himself two or
three weeks ago, and the young woman who was putting together this gathering in the
Watervliet High School wanted us to have a candlelight service to remember this young
man. One of the things that struck me was this powerful instinct towards using light,
candlelight, towards remembering someone, whose death was so tragic, so shrouded in
despair and hopelessness, and remembering that young man through the use of light,
perhaps reminding them that he was once light to them, and that even now, even in
that difficult, painful, dark moment, there was still hope, still light in this world, still light
left over from the brief life he lived in this world. The darkness of the world may try and
try to extinguish all the hope remaining in this world, but the Light, as most fully
expressed in this Jesus of Nazareth, this Light cannot be put out, can never be snuffed
out, because this light has always been, and is still the ultimate creative and powerful
force of the universe.

And the reason why there can be hope, at least according to our text today, goes to the
second point I wanted to distill from this rich text today, and that is that the reason why
there can still be hope in this world, why we can still believe in the light, is because of
who this Hope has become, and how this hope responded to the darkness of this
world. Instead of washing away the darkness of the world through floods, as God did
with Noah, God choose a different path, a path that has made all the difference for us
and this world. Again, Peterson does such a wonderful job with this passage, because
in verse 14 he translates the text this way: 14The Word became flesh and blood, and
moved into the neighborhood.   I simply love the way he puts it, this idea that God’s
response to the shadows in this world is to move back into the neighborhood, in and
through this Jesus. Instead of continuing to speak at us, to keep telling us what we
have and haven’t done right through the prophets of old, or destroying the world all
over again, as God did with Noah, God comes to us, moving into the neighborhood with
us, in this Christ.

Now, why in the world would that matter, this “moving into the neighborhood” really
matter, considering that the world has had some obvious moments of deep darkness
since Christ was born thousands of years ago? Well, frankly, we Christians have been
arguing about that since the beginning, since the early days of the church, and we’ve
all got our points of view, believe me, and the history of the Christian church is littered
with different ways of explaining it. For me, personally, and, of course, this doesn’t
have to be the way you understand it, but for me, the reason why this move from
heaven to earth makes a difference is because I feel like I can hope again, I can
believe again, I can know that even the darkest night, like the one Christ experienced
on that cross thousands of years ago, even that dark night, is answered by the dawn
some three days later, that you can never ever extinguish the light, you can never root
out all the hope out of us human beings and out of the world, because now, hope is
living is right next door, in this Christ, in you and me, in this God given skin and bones
thousands of years ago, but also given skin and bones in you and and you and you.
For me, I can look at the darkness in the world, and in my braver moments, the
darkness within me, and still know that The light shines in the darkness and the
darkness did not overcome it. Amen and amen.