John 1:1-14
I enjoy teaching confirmation class,
which in the United Methodist Church is one of those duties specifically
assigned to pastors. I think that taking
people with four years of college and three years of seminary and hours and
hours of continuing education and forcing them to take the questions of
thirteen-year olds or to make the importance of Christian belief and practice
clear to them on days when they really don’t want to be there is good for the
clergy. Of course, every class is
different and has its own character and they stand out in unique ways.
Back in the early ‘90’s I was
serving as part of a group ministry of four inner-city churches and was
co-teaching the confirmation program with a colleague. Now, the students that year were the sort who
loved philosophy. One of them I called,
“Eeyore,” but he could have been called, “Jean-Paul,” because you could easily
picture him sitting in a café in Paris and talking about the emptiness of life. When we went on a retreat he didn’t want to
get up at 6:00 for breakfast (for which I couldn’t blame him) but instead of
saying, “I want to sleep longer,” he stuck his head out of his sleeping bag and
said, “Why should I get up when I’ll only have to go to sleep again in eighteen
hours?” You get the picture.
So my colleague and co-leader had to
miss a session that was on “Names of God”.
It touched on titles that the Bible uses for the divine, including the
one we come across this evening, where John calls Jesus “The Word”. As I say, this was a group that enjoyed
thinking and approaching God with their minds.
(Remember, we’re supposed to love the Lord “with all our hearts and all our minds and all our souls and all our
strength.”) They latched onto John’s
vision of Jesus’ being intertwining with the being of God the Father from all
eternity and of his being the pattern for creation in some way. Being not long out of seminary myself, I
taught them a phrase to express that and the next week we began class this way:
“Okay, kids! Let’s review things for
Pastor Janet. Paul Tillich described God
as…” “The ontological ground of all being.”
Then we watched her fall apart.
John does things like that, and
that’s one of the things that speaks to me about the way he declares the good
news.
“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 overcome it.” [John 1:1-5]
There
are times when human beings need to be reminded that God is eternal and
omnipotent, beyond all of our comprehension, majestic and almighty, the Ancient
of Days, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the
last; and there are times when we need to know that God has lived here among us
in the flesh, that he grew thirsty when the day was hot and sat down at a well,
that he had friends who disappointed him even though they loved him, that he
cared what would happen to his mother when he couldn’t look after her in her
old age, that he returned from death a whole and entire person who could sit
down to eat with his followers and could point out his scars.
So if I want to see Jesus through
John’s eyes, that’s what I see.
One further catch, though: there are
three other letters in the New Testament that are traditionally attributed to
John. Mind you, John (or its Greek
equivalent) was a common name then, as it is now. They were written late in the first century,
sometime after the gospel of John. But
they use a lot of the same style and grammar and vocabulary as the gospel, and
even if they come from a different person’s pen they come from the same school
of thought and devotion.
“We declare to you what was from the beginning,
what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and
touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have
seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with
the Father and was revealed to us— we
declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship
with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus
Christ. We are writing these
things so that our joy may be
complete.” [I John 1:1-4]
What
they add to the mix is their insistence that it isn’t enough simply to try to
understand what God has done for us in Jesus.
What is on us is to see the world the way that God shows it to us
through Jesus’ eyes.
“Now by this we may be sure that we know him, if we obey his
commandments. Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him’, but does not obey
his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not
exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God
has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever
says, ‘I abide in him’, ought to walk just as he walked.” [I John 1:3-6]
I try to get that through to my
confirmation classes, but when I do that I am really trying to get that lesson
through to myself. Belief and action go
hand-in-hand. Sometimes you act because
you believe, and sometimes you believe because you act. A few years ago I was working with some
parishioners, rehabbing an old rowhouse.
Our job for that day involved digging out part of the cellar so that the
dirt floor could be replaced with concrete.
After awhile, it was clear that one of the men was having a hard time
with something about the assignment and we went outside and I asked him what
was going on. He told me that his father
had been a miner, and that although he knew that he had loved his family, that
afternoon as he found himself digging in the dark the way his father did every
day for decades, it suddenly hit him how much he had loved them to put himself
through that his whole life.
We learn the depths of God’s love
for us in the same way, when we love as he first loved us. He loved us enough to go from being the
eternal and omnipotent Lord of all to being a corpse hanging on a cross. And that was so that we could go from being
lifeless people, not knowing why we should even get out of bed in the morning,
to being… well, let’s hear how John puts it:
“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.” [John 1:10-13]
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