Our Stories, Our Gifts: Word and World (John 1:1-18)
Fourth Sunday of Advent
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
2 The Word was with God in the beginning.
3 Everything came into being through the Word,
and without the Word
nothing came into being.
What came into being
4 through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.
5 The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.
6 A man named John was sent from God. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning the light, so that through him everyone would believe in the light. 8 He himself wasn’t the light, but his mission was to testify concerning the light.
9 The true light that shines on all people
was coming into the world.
10 The light was in the world,
and the world came into being through the light,
but the world didn’t recognize the light.
11 The light came to his own people,
and his own people didn’t welcome him.
12 But those who did welcome him,
those who believed in his name,
he authorized to become God’s children,
13 born not from blood
nor from human desire or passion,
but born from God.
14 The Word became flesh
and made his home among us.
We have seen his glory,
glory like that of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.
15 John testified about him, crying out, “This is the one of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is greater than me because he existed before me.’”
16 From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace;
17 as the Law was given through Moses,
so grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ.
18 No one has ever seen God.
God the only Son,
who is at the Father’s side,
has made God known. (CEB)
When I was a
kid—as in kindergarten or first grade, so a child indeed—I had a secret
plan. It wasn’t to learn how to fly like
some of my peers, and it wasn’t to steal all my brother’s toys since that plan
was hardly a secret; I had a secret plan that I was going to learn every language
there was.
Of course, once I grew up a bit and
started actually learning languages, I discovered that they are very
difficult and have their own idioms and grammatical systems and some of
them don’t use sound-based letters but meaning-based characters, which is to
say nothing of sign language. I have, to
date, studied some ten different languages, and I remain terrible at every one
except English. My secret plan has not
fared well.
Studying all these languages, however,
has taught me a great deal about the power of language. It’s true that much of our communication is
nonverbal and wrapped up in body-based cues, but the way we explain things to
each other has a great deal of impact.
This shows up in the ways we have different speaking and writing styles
for different settings: I could have written this sermon in the style of
my texts to my friends, but I don’t think that’s what you’re expecting or what I
am called to deliver. The importance of
our language is also in the ways we try to find just the right words for a conversation,
wanting the person who reads our writings or listens to our statements to truly
understand what we wish to convey. “I
like you” means quite a few different things in English, which either results
in the middle school creation of “like like” or pulls the need for “attraction,”
“affection,” “I am enamored of you.” How
we say what we want to say helps us figure out how to relate to each other, how
to help each other, and how to hear the stories we are trying to tell. Words carry a great deal of power.
“In the beginning was the Word,” says
John, our fourth and final gospel writer in our Advent series on the ways the
four evangelists speak of Jesus’ birth.
We began with Mark, who skips Jesus’ birth and childhood in favor of
diving right into the need for this Messiah as announced by John the Baptist
and the immediacy of active ministry. In
Luke, we listened to Mary’s song of how God is more powerful than greed and how
inequity stands no chance against the wonder of God’s mercy and justice. With Matthew, we walked through Jesus’ family
graveyard to understand that this holy Child was born into a story that had
carried through generations upon generations.
These three are called the “synoptic”
gospels, a Greek loan word roughly meaning “similar sight.”[1] Matthew, Mark, and Luke use similar sources
to tell similar stories for their different audiences, using different tactics
and different styles but offering a measurably shared collection of Jesus’ life. John, on the other hand, goes off on his own,
offering not a tailored biography but “a unique vision of Jesus Christ for the
life of the believing community…a theological reflection on the meaning of [Jesus’
life] from the perspective of believing.
It is written, in other words, ‘from faith to faith,’” as Dorothy Ann Lee
of Trinity College Theological School writes.[2]
John is the symbolic gospel, building
his picture of Jesus around the language of “signs” that point to Jesus’ divine
status. John is less interested in how
Jesus came to be than why; this is God coming to humanity in a
tangible way. Professor Karoline Lewis
writes, “‘The Word became flesh’ states most clearly the theological promise of
John. This primordial Word, which was in the beginning with God, a partner in
creation, in relationship with God and who is God, has now become human. While
the NRSV translates the verse, ‘and lived among us’ the verb here is skenoo,
‘to tent’ or ‘to tabernacle.’ Most readers of the Gospel of John will be
familiar with the translation ‘and dwelt among us.’ The verb can also be
translated, ‘took up residence’ and thus Peterson’s The Message, ‘moved
into the neighborhood.’”[3] John, writing to a semi-established faith
system that had been around long enough to see the Jewish Temple fall and the
letters of Paul raise up an entirely new generation or two of Gentiles and Jews
alike as Christ-followers, knew that the story of Jesus as such didn’t need a
fourth telling.[4] The story of God in Jesus did. The story of the divine come to pitch a tent
among the dwellings of creation did.
If Mark began with the immediacy of ministry,
and Luke went back before that to the story of Jesus’ parents, and Matthew went
back before that to the very first people, then John reaches even
further. “In the beginning,” he writes,
very deliberately echoing the first words of the Hebrew Bible and the first
story of creation in Genesis, the story in which God spoke creation into being,
in which words mattered so much that everything came from them. But before the words themselves, says John,
there was the Word.
In English Bibles, “Word” is
capitalized in these opening verses, which is a purposeful nod to the fact that
languages do different things. Words, in
English, are the sense units of meaning, but “word” in Greek has several
different meanings. What English thinks
of as “word” with a lowercase “w” is usually lexi, like our collections
of words called “lexicons.” What English
makes into Word with a capital W is logos, a sort of ultra-word.[5] Logos, in John’s world, was used to
describe a Greek philosophy of that which ordered the universe, the sort of
guiding principle of creation.[6] “The author of The Gospel According to John
used this philosophical expression, which easily would be recognizable to
readers in the Hellenistic (Greek cultural) world, to emphasize the redemptive
character of the person of Christ, whom the author describes as ‘the way, and
the truth, and the life.’”[7] John is taking a philosophical concept of the
time, a bodiless word, and giving it a name, a face, an anchor in the Person of
Christ. John’s choice of logos rather
than lexi says that the God Who could speak creation into being can do
even more than that; “This, this is Who is present with you, this is Who loves
you, this is Who calls you by name—the One Who is bigger, older, more complex
than the universe itself.” Words are
important, and for John the Word that was so much more than words was paramount,
because there is so much to be had from it.
“What came into being through the Word was life,” John writes, “and the
life was the light for all people. The
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.”
John almost interrupts himself at this
point for clarification; yes, there was a man named John—the Baptist, here, not
the writer—but he wasn’t the Word, the logos, just in case you were
confused. And then the gospel returns to
its poetry almost as if to say but wait, there’s more! Not only is God in the beginning of all
things, the bones of the very universe; not only is there an inextinguishable
light so that we need never fear being lost in the unknown darkness; not only
is the light and the Word given to all, but all are authorized to become God’s
children.
“The audience arrives,” writes
Professor Sherri Brown of Creighton University, “at the pivot of the prologue
and the hinges upon which the pivot turns (verse 12). The force of the entire
prologue is poised on the axis of the mission of the Word: ‘he gave power to
become children of God’… This central assertion, the giving of power to those
who receive the Word to become children of God, is the crux of the prologue’s
message to its audiences. This familial language is often used across the
Gospel to describe relationship with God. Establishing childhood of God through
the Son is the culmination of all God’s dealings with the world, the goal of
the Creator and creation. This expressed aim affects every statement that
follows…Jesus, the Word of God made human as Christ and Son, will make God
known through his life and ministry. The
Gospel will narrate the how of the covenantal claim that the Prologue
introduces.”[8]
The synoptic gospels want us to know
Who Jesus was—His teachings, His humanity, His community, His place in
history. John wants us to know who we can
become in Jesus; how the Word remakes us, restores us, carves space for every
single person regardless of lineage or nationality. This John who speaks of the children of God is
the same John who wrote one of the most oft-quoted and truncated pieces of
Scripture: John 3:16. “God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son”—God so loved the world, the entirety of
it, everybody, every thing, that not only were we given the Son but invited to
become children ourselves. It doesn’t
matter what your race is, or your gender, or your marital status, or your bank
account balance, or your ability to learn new languages; none of that can
disqualify you from the love of a God Who asks only that we be in deliberate
relationship with this Word Who binds everything together.
Language matters, and the language
here of that relationship offer being a “child” of God may not be particularly
appealing to those of us with less than stellar parental models. But in the beginning was the Word, and in the
Word was life, and in the life was light, and in the light was hope, and in the
hope was God’s immortal gift of love without condition, love without
limitation, love without sin, love that has been since the beginning and will
be past the end. Being a child of God is
a technicolor extravaganza of welcome, an entirely new grammatical style unlike
anything we can create with each other, and John insists that the cosmic
vastness of logos offers to each of us the deep truth of belonging to a
family.
In the Methodist tradition, our
language for this is “prevenient grace”—God exists, and therefore there is
grace for everyone. It is ours to reach
out and accept it, this “grace upon grace,” this love larger than the stars
spoken into existence when there was only chaos in the darkness.
It is the last day of Advent; this
year, it is also Christmas Eve, so there are more services tonight, see you
then. For now, we light one more candle
in the wreath and speak the power of love; for now, we wait a few more hours
for the birth of the Christ child, a displaced baby of a poor family of an oppressed
people yanked about by the power of empire.
For now, we look to the as-yet-unlit Christ candle and know that we have
spent the year since we last gathered around this wreath speaking words that
were helpful and words that were tremendously hurtful. We have made promises and broken them, offered
lies instead of truths, and refused to speak against injustice. We have soothed pain with whispered
assurances, called the outsiders in to restore wholeness, and challenged
complacency. We have used and misused
the power of language, and still, always, ever, God calls to us as beloved
children. “The Word became flesh / and
made his home among us. / We have seen his glory, / glory like that of a
father’s only son, / full of grace and truth.”
Rev. Dr. Cheryl Anderson of
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary says of this text, “What we need to do
is see that this is a text that is time-bound, that is determined by the
culture in which is was written, but that our sense of God, our sense of the
Holy Spirit, isn’t time-bound. We have
to ask ourselves again, what’s the word of God for this time and this place?”[9]
What word do you bring to the world as
we enter the Christmas season, Church?
What language do you use to bring peace, hope, joy, and love to yourself
and to the people looking to see the light in you? How do you listen for God’s grace, freely
given, and become God’s child in all the wild weirdness that that means?
Merry almost Christmas, family. May our words be gentle enough to heal, sharp
enough to inspire change, and loving enough to reflect the light that shines and
the darkness will not overcome. Amen.
[2] “John,”
Dorothy Ann Lee, in New Interpeters’ Bible One Volume Commentary (Abingdon:
Nashville, 2010), 709.
[4]
Lee, 711, posits a writing date of 95-100 CE.
[5] λέξη
vs. λόγος
[7] Ibid.
[9] “1946:
The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture,” dir. Sharon Roggio (Acowsay Film Company,
2022), beginning 1:16.
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