“In the Flesh” - January 5, 2014

John 1:1-18

  

            In the ancient world, the Greeks were big on thinking of God as beyond all involvement in this world of ours.  By that, I mean the educated class and the philosophers.  Regular people had their stories of Zeus and Athena and so forth, and they pictured them as having emotions like ours.  For instance, one version of the background to the Trojan War says that it began with three goddesses arguing over who was most beautiful.  The deep thinkers looked down on such tales and said there was no way true divinity would get mixed up in all of that sort of thing.  In fact, there were those who said that God was so far beyond the concerns of this world that they weren’t sure that the world’s creator was God.  (Other philosophical problems issue from that, but we won’t go there for now.)

            One philosopher, with both Jewish and Greek roots, lived in Egypt and went by the name Philo of Alexandria.  He suggested – trying to reconcile his philosophical education to the notion that his Jewish relatives held that the world was created when God spoke, saying

“Let there be light!”

 – that there was something called “Logos”, which in Greek combines aspects of many of our words, including “word” or “reason” or “purpose” or “meaning”.  Philo called this “Logos” the creator: not exactly God, but God’s purposeful word.  Admittedly, it was somewhat confusing what he meant, even then.

            Along comes this Christian writer we call John, not long after that.  He begins to write about Jesus and to try to explain that he was more than just one of those prophetic figures who had listened to and articulated God’s will for humanity.  John spoke of Jesus as being the one who embodied it fully.  So he used some of this philosophical language.

“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.” [John 1:1-3]

The philosophers and theologians could understand and work with that language.  They could argue or agree, but they knew what was meant by “the Word”.

            They could deal with it.  Some of them even went along with the idea that the Word could be majestic and powerful, standing out against the wicked world.

“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.” [John 1:3-5]

 Then came the point where John said,

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” [John 1:14]

That was taking it too far.  If the Word was God, the Word could not be human, flesh and blood.  That was too limited, too touched by the conditions of life as we know it, by things like suffering and sorrow and pain and even death and decay.  In 1985, Human League sang,

“I'm only human
Of flesh and blood I'm made
…
Human
Born to make mistakes…”

The philosophers would have said, “Yes!  That’s it!  That’s the problem!”  But – here we go – John would also have said, “Yes!  That’s it!”, only adding, “That’s the solution!”

Have you ever tasted the tea from one of those coffee machines in hospital waiting rooms, the kind of tea that looks right and smells right and is definitely hot enough (maybe too hot) but somehow just tastes mostly like tea?  Have you ever eaten potato chips made entirely without salt?  Have you used only powdered milk for any length of time?  "Almost" doesn't get it right.

Would you want treatment from doctors and nurses who have never been sick?  Would you take batting advice from someone whose claim to fame is her shelf full of bowling trophies?  Would you want Denzell Washington or Harrison Ford representing you in court just because they’ve been cast as lawyers in the movies?  You want medical professionals whose compassion arises from knowing what it’s like to ache.  You want your coach to have played your sport.  You want your attorney to have gone to law school and to know the legal system.

            When John says, “the Word became flesh,” he says that God really cares about the world, about human beings, with such deep and genuine love that there is no way to step back from total involvement in all that we go through.  If God really cares, then what is called for is not some halfway or distant oversight, and certainly not assigning the job to an underling.  God cares so much that

“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 1:14]

If that means taking on human suffering and pain and even human death, so be it.  The Word will be embodied, not just spoken.  The Word will not just be about God or about humanity.  The Word will be God and be human, both at the same time.

            Over centuries, we Christians tried to express in formal statements how that divine and that human side of the Word whom we name Jesus are related.  We constantly try to put the unspeakable mystery into speech.  We say,

“We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father,
through whom all things were made.”[1]

We say,

“We believe in God:

    who has created and is creating,

    who has come in Jesus,

       the Word made flesh,

       to reconcile and make new,

    who works in us and others

       by the Spirit.”[2]

We have put it in many, many ways over the centuries, but have held onto John’s assertion that God loves us not in abstract ways but as particular, flesh-and-blood people; and has made himself available to us not just in the abstract but as the first-century, male, Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking, Jewish carpenter named Jesus. 

Some people want to talk about God philosophically, and you can play that game if you want to.  However, the moment you want to get beyond talking about God and start getting to know God, you have to deal with God in-the-flesh, somebody who had family and friends and enemies; who told amazing stories; who went to weddings and who cried when one of his friends died; someone who got so angry when he saw religious corruption that he flipped some tables over; someone who trembled in fear when he thought of his own death – but went to it anyway out of love, all out of love, for us. 

“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 1:18]

So this John guy, after this incredibly high-octane introduction, goes on to tell some stories about what Jesus said and did, and when he came to the end of his book, said,

“there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”  [John 21:25]

---

[1] from The Nicene Creed

[2] from “A Statement of Faith of the United Church of Canada”