But
wait . . . there’s more! The Word was with God and the Word was God?
What is that supposed to
mean? How can a person be somebody and be with that somebody at the same time? Now the pain is getting stronger, and it's throbbing, as if somebody’s driving an
ice-pick into my brain. And all this in
just the first sentence, too.
To
paraphrase a certain Midwestern girl, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and why should we be? We're dealing with the eternal here, with
things of the divine, our puny minds aren't supposed
to get this stuff, God is way beyond us so we might as well just go with
it, etcetera,
etcetera . . . But perhaps part of
it . . . Certainly not all, but part
. . . is how we’ve been conditioned, how we’ve been taught, as much as anything else?
As
I've said before, Western reasoning—and by “western” I mean Greco-Roman, which
holds sway in Europe and the Americas—western reasoning is based on the notion
that if something is one thing, it can't be another. That the answer to any yes or no question is
either . . . yes or no, and nothing in between.
It's how computers function, as a series of binary operations, and how
we've all been taught to think. “Rational”
thought is a series of “if-then” statements: if A is true, then B must be
true. If not-A, then C, and so on. And thank goodness without this kind of
reasoning, which might be called dualistic,
we wouldn't have computers, or space flight, or cold medicine. All scientific and technological and advancement
depends on this kind of thought.
And yet . . . In Eastern thought there
is another way. In Buddhism, it's called
advaita, the non-dual, and right here
at the outset, in the very first verse, there is a statement right in that
groove, a “non-dualistic” statement or,
as Richard Rohr might say, a “both-and” declaration: this “Word” both was God and was with God. And following
close on its heels is another claim:
all things came into being through him
and at the same time, in him. In and through . . . all things, the entire creation. This Word who was God and was with God
. . . everything was created in and through him, the whole shebang. Things were created in him and through the
Word, but that selfsame Word was God,
was it not? So all things were created by him as well . . . weren’t they? Are your heads starting to hurt too?
Let's just stop there a moment to catch
our breath . . . or our heads . . . we’re talking about a cosmic being here,
are we not? A cosmic entity . . . And we
often conflate this entity with Jesus, do we not? But note carefully: this entity is not Jesus,
not yet anyway. It is the Word, which is
what we use to translate the Greek word logos
. . . but “Word” doesn't really compass all the nuances of logos . . . It is full of inference and meaning. It
could mean a single word, or an idea, a concept, or it could mean a reckoning,
a settlement of accounts. In Stoic
philosophy it was the rational principle of the universe, by which all the
cosmos was ordered, but John was a Jew, and in Jewish thought it was rich with
significance . . . the word of God spoke creation into existence . . . God's
word ordered Jewish lives in the form of the law, and through the prophets it
spoke out in comfort or in judgment . . . it is related to Lady Wisdom, who is
called Sophia, who in Proverbs works alongside God, accomplishing God's plan
for humanity . . . all of these associations – creative force, rational
principle, law, judgment, wisdom – all are bound up in that one word Logos,
which we translate as "Word."
And when John uses it here, all these associations come along with it.
And what came into being both through and in this Word? What came into
being was life itself. But not life in
the narrow, biological sense—as in something with ribonuclease acid that
reproduces itself—but in the sense of all created things, for where would we
biological things be without rocks and carbon and oxygen? Where would we be without silicon and soil
and sunlight? What came into being
through the Word, what came into being in
the Word was everything, it was
indeed life.
Others in the New Testament have
recognized this eternal, cosmic nature of the Word as well. There, he is called the Christ, and in
Ephesians, Christ is “all in all,” in 1 Corinthians, Christ is the power and
wisdom of God . . . In Revelations, Christ is the alpha and omega, the
beginning and the end. But nowhere
else—besides John, that is—is the notion as well-developed as in the Christ
Hymn in Colossians’ first chapter, where Christ “is the image of the invisible
God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on
earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.” Sounds remarkably like our passage, doesn't
it? Yet it was written considerably
before, and there’s little evidence that John had contact with Colossians . . .
but once again, all things were created both
through Christ and in Christ. Further, Colossians claims that “in him all
things hold together.” That is, Christ is both superstructure and infrastructure,
endoskeleton and exoskeleton of the whole shebang. Christ is the organizing principle of the
universe, the fundamental particle, the superglue
that keeps all things together . . . only this
superglue actually works.
Finally, Christ “is the beginning, the
firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in
everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell . . .” The fullness of God . . . poured out into
Christ . . . an important thing to note, about all these things, that it's not Jesus they are talking about, but
Christ . . . It wasn't Jesus there at the beginning of things, it's not Jesus who
holds all things together, it is not Jesus who is the alpha and the omega, the
beginning and the end. It is the Christ,
which is Greek for anointed one, who is eternal.
As some of you know, I’m involved in a
two-year Living School, and one of my instructors is Richard Rohr, who used to
be here in Cincy . . . And when he was asked what he wanted to get across in
one particular unit of study, he said he'd love it if he could get folks to
stop thinking so much about the little baby Jesus. And by that he meant not only that Jesus had
a ministry as an adult, but that Jesus was a particular instantiation, which we
call incarnation, of the divine Word,
and that it's not Jesus up in the sky, in a what a friend we have in Jesus kind
of way.
What Rohr was talking about is what many
theologians call the Cosmic Christ, or the Christ Principle, and it is what
John describes in this first breathtaking, confounding, wonderful chapter, and though John goes on to describe the
particular instantiation as human—which we think of as the incarnation, and which as we will see next week might be better
thought of as an incarnation—it is
worth considering the Christ Principle, for it is that Cosmic Christ that is
the divine spark that underlies all of creation.
It is also that cosmic Christ, that
cosmic ordering principle that holds all things together, that divine spark that
I believe underlies and ties together the world faiths, East and West . . .
What we call Christ, Buddhists call karma
. . . Hindus call Devanagari . . .
All describe eternal ordering principles, fundamental divine particles that
hold all creation together, that are intertwined, suffusing all of reality.
Now, before you accuse me of heresy, and
I have to beat a hasty retreat—feets don't fail me now—let me say that what is
unique about Christianity, what is our ace in the hole as Jim Finley likes to
say, is the notion of incarnation. Which
John describes next and which we take up next week. What gives us our power, what gives us hope is that we believe that this
divine, eternal being—co-existent in the beginning, who was with God and was God—emptied himself of his God-hood
for you and me. And that's where we take
up the story next week. Amen.
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