It's kind of unusual for me to preach on
the same passage two weeks in a row, but then again, John's first chapter is
not just any passage. It spans the whole
of creation, up until the time of its writing, at least, and really: you could
argue that it does the whole thing, cause what has changed since Jesus’
day? Just more wars and rumors of wars,
conducted with ever-increasing sophistication and whole-sale slaughter . . . More
peoples oppressing other peoples, not so different from the Romans of the day .
. . this passage covers it all, not explicitly, of course, but it begins with
the beginning, in the beginning, quoting Genesis quite handily, and letting us
know what that pesky first-person plural might have been . . . Remember? When it comes to making human beings, God
says “Let us make humankind in our
image, according to our likeness . .
.” And though killjoy biblical scholars
have proposed that this “our” is a remnant of the more “primitive,”
multi-god origins of the tale, but I like to think that John gives us one
answer, at least, as to who “they” might
be “in the beginning.”
Anyway.
John’s first chapter covers
that beginning, telling us that the Word both was God and was with God,
and that all of creation—everything: rocks and trees and flowers and bees—came
into being both in and through him, and it was nothing short of life, that was
the light of the people, that provided for them and illuminated the way. And thus, the first part of John's prose poem
operates on a cosmic scale, and indeed, this Word is what theologians have
called the cosmic Christ, or less
personally, the Christ mystery, the eternal Word that became incarnate in an
unique way as Jesus of Nazareth.
If the first part of this passage is on
a cosmic scale, it quickly moves to the human as it describes a forerunner: “There
was a man sent from God,” we are told, “whose name was John.” He wasn't the light that was life, but came
as a witness—and in Greek, that’s martyr, and we know that he would be both:
witness and martyr, perhaps the first
to give his life in service to the incarnate one. And the true light—which, remember, was the
light of the people—was coming into the world. It was, as Paul would say, emptying itself of
its godhood, its eternity, and taking
human form
What must it have been like to be John
the witness? To know, from before birth,
your role as the one who foretold? After
that one leap in the womb, that first awakening of the heart in Elizabeth's
womb? Did he but count the days until
that fateful wilderness meeting? Did
that prenatal encounter cock his eye, did it throw him off, just a little, so that his friends growing up would point and
say “here comes crazy John, talking about the chosen one again?”
From the cosmic notion of the pre-existent
Word, who was with God and who was God,
to a very human, hair-shirted wilderness-hopper seems a long ways, but was it really? After all, in the very first words of the gospel John we’re told that all things
came into being through him, and at the same time in him, and what more intimate relationship can there be than that?
I mean, my liver is in me, and my eye, and they are part of me . . . And
they are of me as well, they are made
of human cells containing 23 pairs of human chromosomes each, and in this way a
human heart is human and not porcine or avian. And by the same token, something
in a dog is canine, something in a cat is feline . . .
And John the gospel-writer tells us that
all things are in this Word, all
things share in this Word-ness, mountains and lilies and cattle and telephone
poles, right on down to one John the locust-eating Baptist, right on down to
you and me. We are all in the Word, so we are all of the world. We share in the divine nature by way of being
part of the divine Word of God..
So, in a real sense, incarnation
occurred 14 billion years ago, as Richard Rohr puts it. when creation was
brought into being through and in the Word, through and in the Christ mystery. If we are part of the divine, then the divine
spirit is part of us. Created matter is
not separate from divine spirit, but intertwined
with it.
Some seven centuries and change ago, an
Italian philosopher and theologian named Giovanni di Fidanza (later canonized
as St Bonaventure) rediscovered this and wove it into his theology of incarnation. According to Bonaventure, everything emanates
from God, everything is an example of God, and everything returns to God in the
end. Emanence, exemplar, consumation—those
are his words for it. We, and everything
else, are created in and through the Word; in us, and in everything else, we
can see the Word; and we, and
everything else, return to the Word in the end.
That was one theologian’s conception of what all this means, anyway . .
. And emanation is a pretty fair description of what John is talking about here
in his first chapter—we are created in and through the eternal Word—and
exemplar seems to line up with the incarnate one’s own description—whatever you
do to the least of these, you do to me—and “returning to God?” Well, just as matter and energy are
conserved, wouldn’t divinity, wouldn’t divine spark be as well?
Well.
Seven and a half centuries after Bonaventure, science is coming around
to describe the same thing, from a different angle, and thinkers like the late
Teilhard de Chardin and Walter Wink are speaking of a re-enchanted universe,
and it's important to understand that the universe isn't being re-enchanted,
it's always been enchanted, we’re just coming to realize it again. After centuries of a disastrous, dualistic
view, where spirit was considered separate and superior to matter, to flesh, we
are re-imaging the universe as being full of spirit, full of divinity, and
there are ramifications of this at all levels.
On a policy level, if everything is enchanted,
if everything contains a spark of the divine, how can creation continue to be exploited,
with whole species being driven to extinction at an ever-accelerating rate,
species created through and in the Word, and thus incarnate spirit us? How can we mow down the God-haunted
mountains, just take their tops right off, to line coal-company pockets, or
poison our divine rivers and streams with pesticides and fertilizers, so they
are at once depopulated and choked with over-bearing single-celled life?
For that matter, how can we keep whole
populations impoverished, whole nations enslaved to the false Gods of
consumerism and greed, when whatever we do to them we do to the Christ within
them?
And on a personal level, what would
happen if each one of us recognized the divine in every other human being? The God-spark in the woman sitting next to
you in the pews, the guy in the pickup truck cutting you off, the Muslim praying
to Allah? How could we treat one
another—our spouses, our children, our friends and neighbors—as we sometimes do
if we recognized and acknowledged the Christ in every one? We are all
incarnations of the divine Word, the mystery that is Christ. As Richard Rohr puts it, there is
incarnation at every level of our enchanted universe.
Well. Our passage ends the with the
classic line: “The Word became flesh and lived among us”—I prefer the King
James’ more poetic “dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of
a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
And I think this verse answers the question some of you all might be
asking: if incarnation happened with the creation of the universe, if creation is
indeed incarnation, why did the
eternal Word empty itself of godhood and become human. It is so we can say we have seen it, so we have experienced it, so
we can point to it and say: this is how it is.
This is how it looks when divinity
and corporeality, divinity and humanity,
are in perfect balance, in perfect harmony one with another. This is how it can be for you and me who are,
after all, siblings of the incarnate Word through Christ.
Poet, theologian and novelist G.K. Chesterton
commented that this truth can only be understood on small stages, and this is
my New Years wish for us all: that we begin to (or continue to) look for and
recognize the incarnate Word in everybody and everything we meet on the
small stages that are our lives. Amen.
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