Try It Again from the Beginning: John 1:1-18
First Sunday of Christmas
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 overtake 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 the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who
has made him known. (NRSVue)
When
I was about eleven or so, my parents decided that we needed to have some Family
Bonding, which resulted in a week-long trip to the Appalachian Mountains to
camp. I don’t mind telling you that I am
an indoor cat; I have always been an indoor cat, and as such am not wild about
the concept or reality of camping.
Camping involves spiders, which I loathe; mosquitoes, which love
me; sponge baths or spider-covered showers, which were even less fun in the
throes of puberty; and sleeping in close quarters with family, who definitely
kick.
I’m
the youngest in my family, so when the three older siblings with me on that
camping trip decided the sleeping arrangements of our shared tent, I was put
near the door—smallest, easiest to step over (and less likely to win a fight
after being stepped on), and absolutely the one to be sacrificed to any
possible bears.
One
of the first nights of the trip, it poured. There is nothing quite like rain in the
mountains, if you’ve never been, and there is nothing quite like rain in the
mountains when you’re the one in the sleeping bag near the leaky tent
door. By morning, I was soaked, chilly,
and miserable from having slept far less than I was awake, watching the rain
inch its way up my sleeping bag fabric. I
remember very little from the rest of that camping trip, but I can still
clearly see my and my next-oldest sister’s sleeping bags stretched out over a clothesline,
just streaming water from the downpour of the night.
My eldest
sister, who had been snugly protected in the middle while the rest of us
unwittingly protected her, had slept like a charm.
I
learned two things on that trip: one, always dig a trench around your tent so
any water pools away from the tent cloth. And two, camping is a messy, uncomfortable,
ridiculous business that only the truly dedicated should attempt.
We
come to this first Sunday of the Christmas season—and yes, it is a season, not
just a day—with the opening of the gospel of John. John does not have a birth narrative the way
Matthew and Luke do; John does not have the heartwarming scenes of shepherds at
a manger, of angels in the fields, of a star guiding people to Mary and Joseph
and their beautiful new son. John,
instead, has a creation story.
“In
the beginning,” writes John, and anyone who has spent approximately two point
eight minutes in the presence of Judaism or Christianity recognizes that
opening. “In the beginning,” writes the
author of Genesis, and John knew his Jewish texts, knew what he was referencing. Where Matthew and Luke spend time in Jesus’
family graveyard giving us the lineage that makes Jesus acceptably human, John
wants to remind people of the other half of the story: Jesus as acceptably God.
The
gospel of John was written toward the end of the first century, some sixty or
so years after the resurrection of Christ.
There had been plenty of time for this fledgling faith to get its feet
under it and start telling consistent stories of who it was and what it
believed. The gospels of Matthew and
Luke had been around for about a generation, Mark even longer. People generally knew Who Jesus was, how He
was born, what it meant for God to become human—but the story had started to
focus almost entirely on Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, focusing on the
defeat of death rather than the wonder of birth.
“If
the season of Christmas is a celebration of God-come-near,” writes Professor Cody
J. Sanders, “then John is preparing us for this enfleshing of the Divine in our
midst by directing our gaze not to a manger or the holy family or the Christ
child, but toward the cosmos, suffused with the light and life coming into the
world, into time, into space, and into our lives.”[1] John reaches into the ethereal that is so far
from a grubby tomb or a hay-filled manger and points to the very beginning of
everything to say here, here is where God comes from; the rest of the story has
to be anchored here. And this John the
Evangelist, who is narrating, introduces another character, John the Baptist,
who testifies to “the light”—not the person, but the Light. Jesus is the Word, the Light, the intangible,
right up until the Word becomes “flesh.”
Sanders
writes, “While our Christmas imagination is shaped most profoundly by the
coming of God with us (humanity), we can have our too-small reading of the
Gospel expanded again by John’s insistence upon the logic of God that suffuses
the cosmos by becoming flesh, a category of being shared by all biotic life.
The Good News is incarnate for all creation, perceived in ways that we cannot
imagine with our limited space-time perspective.”[2] Sometimes we get caught up in the language
that God became man, but that’s such a small portion of this. God became flesh, “sarx” (σάρξ) in
Greek, which mostly means “embodied.”[3] God poured Godself into physical form,
reaching five fingers out to the creation God had made and calling all of it good.
The
Church of the turn of the first century and the Church of the weird space
between Christmas and Epiphany can so easily get stuck in Jesus-as-human or Jesus-as-God,
slotting days for one or the other like Jesus is switching back and forth
between limited body and unlimited Being.
Especially in modern times, it is so tempting to talk about Jesus as a
very enlightened guy, some dude who had lovely ideas we should follow. But John the Evangelist wanted to remind
everyone that Jesus was human and divine, all the time. Being born was not the trick, the miracle;
after all, all of us have managed to be born, and none of us are God.
(If this is
news to you, let’s chat.)
Birth was
not the miracle. Being God was
the miracle, joining the infinite holy with the very finite mortal, taking the
mind of One Who created planets and learning the experience of shivering. From the beginning, John insists, Jesus
was there. When the world was formed,
Jesus was there. When John the Baptist
started telling everyone that God would be coming around, Jesus was there. And when God put on flesh as part of this
creation, Jesus was there.
“The
Word became flesh and lived among us,” and Meda Stamper writes, “[t]he verb for
‘lived’ in 1:14 is based on the noun for ‘tabernacle’ or ‘tent.’ This evokes
the tabernacle in which the glory of God dwells with the Israelites in the
wilderness (Exodus 25:8; 40:34), and it points forward to the coming of God in
Revelation 21:3, where this verb appears again. The word for ‘tent’ or ‘tabernacle’
appears in the Synoptic accounts of the Transfiguration, when the disciples see
the glory of Jesus in conversation with Moses and Elijah. In John 1:14, the
glory of the Word is fully present and vulnerable in flesh, a word that
encompasses all of what it means to be human, but because this remains the
life-giving Word, he is also full of grace and truth.”[4]
In
the beginning was the Word, was Jesus-as-God, was the Almighty Everlasting, and
then Jesus-as-God-the-Almighty-Everlasting came and pitched a tent among God’s
creation. Jesus-as-God-the-Almighty-Everlasting
hung out in the manger, yes, but that was a beginning in everything that
camping out among humanity implies. Jesus was here for the soaked sleeping bags
and the miserable nights without sleep, the family squabbles and the mosquitos,
the spiders and the sponge baths, and Jesus was here for the presentation
of a new kind of kingdom, the fierce adherence to love that costs something and
is absolutely priceless, the defeat of death at the very last. John is trying to remind the Church two
generations removed from the man they’re worshipping that it means something
that the Word became flesh. It means
something to go back to the beginning of the story and remember that it is
absolutely about the manger and the shepherds and the forgotten people whom God
prized enough to bring to the forefront of the miracle, and it is
absolutely about the God Who said, “Let there be light,” and there was.
God holds
the muck and the miraculous together because that’s Who God is: Someone deeply,
wholly, incredibly in love with this creation, unwilling to let it be separate
no matter how much we hack at the connection we have, refusing to watch us wander
off into darkness alone, absolutely ready to reach us in whatever way will work. The Reverend J. Barrett Lee puts it as, “The
light that makes all things visible did not stay abstract. The wisdom that
shaped the universe did not remain distant.
It took on flesh. It moved into
our neighborhood. It became a human
life. And because of that, Jesus is not
where we stop looking for God—it’s where we start. Jesus becomes the lens, not the limit.”[5]
John
was reminding his readers that there is nowhere we go, from the beginning to
the end, without God alongside us. As we
move through the Christmas season , we do not leave Jesus in the manger being
adorable and slightly itchy from the hay; Jesus goes with us as we go back to
work, or back to school. Jesus goes with
us as we remember again that camping comes with dirt and spiders, that it comes
with freezing rain and snow that becomes an awful grey, and we have to learn where
the holiness is in them. Jesus goes with
us as we encounter this next year’s forms of bigotry and evil, of racism and
sexism and homophobia and transphobia and classism and the arrogant cruelty of
white Christian nationalism, all while we still carry the open wounds of last
year’s battles. Jesus goes with us as we
discover new forms of justice work to which we are called, new ways to be
inclusive that we’d never thought of before, new courage to rest and then renew
our refusal to be complicit in the devaluing of this good creation God has
made—yes, even the spiders and the freezing rain. Jesus goes with us; the Light shines; the
Word becomes flesh. In the
beginning. Until the end.
It
is Christmas, a time of celebrating God’s incarnation, God’s taking on
flesh. And it is Christmas, a time of
returning to the beginning in which the Word was, and the Word was Light, and
Light shone on the sinner and the saved alike, and the world was invited over
and over and over again to see that grace is always so much bigger, so much
wider, so much more than we had thought.
Merry
Christmas; may this beginning be a reminder of the God Who walks beside you,
Who lives in the infinite and the enfleshed, Who makes the very heart of the
Divine known. Amen.
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