John 1: 1-18
January 2, 2005
2 Christmas A
John 1: 1-18
January 2, 2005
“One of Us”
Even though December 25th is past and a new year has begun, here in the church we are still celebrating Christmas, and telling the Christmas story. I just finished reading it from John’s Gospel; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.” Every year around this time, we hear John’s version of the Christmas story, but somehow, it doesn’t seem too Christmassy, does it? It somehow doesn’t evoke an image of the Nativity scene that we know and love so well.
Where are the angels and shepherds that Luke tells us about? Where are Matthew’s Wise Men? Where are Mary and Joseph, and for that matter, the Baby Jesus? And what’s this about the Word becoming flesh? What word?
Whose word?
We are surrounded and bombarded by words every day. Television, radio, and the Internet all broadcast words that vie for our attention. And we talk. We talk a lot. Research shows that the average man speaks about 25,000 words a day, and the average woman, about 30,000. Words become so numerous that sometimes we need to tune them out. But the Word that St. John refers to in his telling of the Christmas story is one that we would do well to listen to.
Listen again to the two defining sentences in today’s gospel; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” We need to figure out exactly what John means by “the Word.” Our first thought might be the Word of God, as we have it recorded in the Bible. We might even recall that in the beginning, God spoke a word, and Creation sprang into existence. Those would be pretty good guesses, but in order to come closer to what John means by “Word”, we have to look at the word in Greek. The Greek word for “Word” is “logos.” Logos is the root of the English word “logic”, but it means much more than that.
To secular Greeks at the time that John wrote, “logos” meant something like, “the rational principle of the universe.” To Christians, it came to mean, “the mind or reason of God.” So when John writes; “In the beginning was the Word,” he is appealing to the philosophical Greeks as well as to religious Jews and Christians; “In the beginning was the Word—the rational principle of the universe, the mind and reason of God.”
But then John takes it a step further, and says that this Word—which in essence is God—became flesh, became one of us. Christians came to call this the “Incarnation”—God becoming a meaty, fleshy human being in Jesus Christ. It is at the core of our belief. God became one of us. Christians are in agreement about this. But to the Greeks of John’s day, such a notion was ridiculous, even offensive.
The Greek philosophers, going back to Socrates, had no use for the body. Socrates, and his student Plato after him, believed that it was the body that stood in the way of true knowledge. The soul, they thought, was always being led astray in its search for truth, because the body which imprisons it attracts distractions. Socrates lists some of them as; “diseases which attack and hinder us in our quest for reality…The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense…Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply to the body and its desires.”
In order to get close to true knowledge, the body has to go. And so in this life, knowledge will always be partial at best, as long as we are “contaminated with this imperfection”—that is, the body. In the meantime, we should “avoid… all contact and association with the body, except when it is absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until God gives us deliverance from it.”
The body, or the flesh, in other words, is at best, a hindrance, and at its worst, corrupt and carnal. It was a nasty place for the human soul to have to live out its existence, and certainly not a place that God would ever be attracted to. To suggest such a thing would have been repulsive to the Greek philosophical mind. But that is exactly what John does.
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.
In a manger, among the poor and humble, the Word—the rational principle of the universe, the mind and reason of God—became flesh, became one of us, so that we might experience the knowledge and the truth that is God. It wasn’t necessary for the body to get out of the way in order for that to happen. God, who made the body in the image of God, needed the body in order to come among us, to become one of us.
The Christmas story that we love so well tells us that over 2000 years ago, the Word became flesh and was born into a world that desperately needed the presence of God, a God who was real and present, not spiritual and distant. Today, we have that very same need. That’s why some people are so desperate for the Second Coming, the return of Christ and the advent of a new world order. But if we really believe in the Incarnation, we needn’t wait for that time to experience the real presence of God. Nor should we.
The Word becoming flesh in Jesus is a powerful statement about God’s presence Jesus, but it is also more. The Word becoming flesh points all of us who are made in the image of God toward each other. It points us toward a new community where we see the truth and dignity of all of God’s children. The Word becoming flesh reminds us that the truth and light of God live within us. Yet, we know that none of us alone is capable of holding all the truth and light, and so we need to depend on each other for pieces of the truth and light that we don’t have yet.
Joan Osborne’s song, “One of Us,” asked the question; “If God had a face, what would it look like?” And the answer to that question is; “God has a face, and it looks like your face, and my face, and the face of human beings everywhere.” The Word in the flesh has now taken up residence in our flesh, in the flesh of all who speak and act on behalf of Jesus.
People donate time and money and prepare and serve meals at PADS shelters, and the Word becomes flesh. Church members visit those who have lost loved ones, and the Word becomes flesh. A woman calls her aging neighbor every day to make sure she is OK, and the Word becomes flesh. Friends wait at the hospital with a husband whose wife is having surgery, and the Word becomes flesh. People of all nations and religions respond with compassion to a far away disaster, and the Word becomes flesh.
In the Christmas Story, the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. God became one of us. 2000 years later, that Word still lives in the flesh. Only now, God is not just in one of us, but in all of us. AMEN