In
the beginning . . . in the beginning .
. . when I hear those words, my mind ranges back over the years, over the eons, to the beginning of the earth, for
that is what John is evoking, using the same words that open our scriptures: “ In
the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a
formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept
over the face of the waters.” The author
of those words assumed that the heavens and the earth were made at the same
time, and he was close . . . The Earth, according to the latest data, is four
and a half billion years old and the universe is almost fourteen billion . . .
only nine billion or so off . . .
But of course that’s beside the point in Genesis, and
beside the point here: both Genesis and John assume God created the whole
shebang, earth and all stars, loud rushing planets, as the hymn goes. The entire universe—whether fourteen billion,
four billion, or even four thousand years
old, as used to be thought—the whole thing, top to bottom, front to back, the
Lord God made it all. And John ups the
ante, talking about the Word with a capital W who was there in the beginning with God, and who mysteriously and at
the same time was God.
And the whole universe was created through this Word—and what could that Word,
that was there at the start of everything, be?
Could it be . . . “let there be?”
As in “let there be light” or “let there be lights in the dome of the
sky?” After all, in both Hebrew and Greek it's one word—a form of
the verb “to be”—and John does say that
all things we're created through this
Word, and what more appropriate word than being
itself?
The concept of being is wound throughout our scriptures—God
called himself that when he spoke to
Moses from the burning bush—and it's only natural, because if nothing else, that's
what the Bible is about, the being of
God and the being of us as well, AKA who God is and who we are . . . And in the
beginning of his Gospel, in this magnificent poem, John ups the ante, he says
that this Word “let there be,” became flesh,
the stuff of you and me and Uncle Joe and Aunt Tilly, ordinary flesh, and then lived right here among
us. And he breathed the same air that we
do and walked the same earth, and I think it was kind of a vote of confidence in
us. I mean, we often have a pretty low
opinion of ourselves as a species, we say we're war-like, lustful, that we’re
one big ball of envy and greed, etc., etc., and I guess it's true, we do have a
few rough edges here and there, but how bad can we be if the creative Word of the universe,
if being itself, thought enough of
us to become incarnate? We must have something going for us for “Let There Be”
to want to be one of us, don't you
think?
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