In the name of God, source of all Being, eternal Word, and holy Spirit. Small words. Big meanings. Spirit. Word. Being. God.
Our first words as children sound small and seem simple. Hot, cold, brother, sister, mine, papa. Mama. But the meanings loom large. When we are small, is there anything more important than what those small words convey?
The first words of the gospel of John are small words.
Small words. Large meanings. Light. Life. Word. Flesh.
And then there are the words at the beginning of the four gospels. Matthew begins with a genealogy. Luke begins with birth announcements. Mark starts straight out with the Baptist in the wilderness. The gospel of John begins, “in the beginning” - or rather before.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being. What came into being through the Word was life, and this life was the light for all people. The light still shines in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out… The Word became a human being and lived among us. We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1:1-4, 14.
What this passage has personally meant to me has changed and grown over the years since I first read it. In high school days, “read the gospel of John first” was common advice to prospective converts.
This advice held for many years for me, until at the suggestion of Carl F. H. Henry, the Key ‘73 initiative chose Luke-Acts for widespread distribution.
Luke has the familiar Christmas story, with angels and shepherds and all. And Matthew has the magi.
Inter-Varsity used to tell people to read Mark first as the shortest and earliest. Read it without notes or advice, they said, as if it were in a sealed envelope you were opening for the first time.
Which would leave us to read it each with our own peculiar prejudices - or ones easily supplied.
John however is admittedly abstract - where are we? In the cosmic vision of Christ Pantocrator, all-ruler, as in those Byzantine ceilings. His serene serious visage looms over us, grand and remote. The human Jesus appears later in John, but appear he does.
At first though we have some basic precepts to lay down. The creator is not remote; he is Emmanuel: God with us.
Jesus was there from the beginning, in fact the beginning of all things began with him: he was already there and all that came into being came through him. Whoa! Heady concept. And how cool is that?
At least I thought so, as a teenager. And I thought I’d got it. At least a grasp on the coattails. How long could I, have I, chewed over the meaning of this passage ever since? And how long and how often have you?
However often we hear it we just seem to spiral deeper into its meaning. Once, some Sundays ago, Deacon Jefferson Bailey and I agreed that when we read the gospel in church, every time it says something new to us - and with the prolog to the gospel of John something deeper emerges.
Indeed I like what Lesslie Newbigin calls it: not so much a prolog (as to a Shakespeare play) as an overture, as to an opera. And indeed John has everything in it - except the kitchen sink.
Though it comes close even to that.
The whole cosmos - the whole created order - is in there for sure, in just the first five sentences.
Julian’s hazelnut or cosmologist’s infinitesimal particle have nothing on John: before it began, he was - he, Jesus, as the Son of God, pre-existed, existed before, anything was made that was made… and so the mind-blowing (as we said in the sixties) phrase … ‘and all that came into being came into being through him.’
Through him all things came to be. The logos, “the eternal word manifest in the reason and order of the cosmos of which it was the creative agent,” was not a new concept to first-century people.
(Massey Shepherd, The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary, 1963, 97)
But now– something new. The Word has become flesh, and dwelt among us.
It all sounds so abstract: source of all being, eternal Word, holy Spirit.
If you had asked Mary on December 26th if it felt abstract you might have gotten a short answer. Joseph might remark that the organizing principle of the cosmos had just wet himself.
[We have just heard on Christmas Eve the story of the manger, about the humanness of Jesus, and all of heaven’s glory in a little room. Shepherds kept their watch by night; and angels sang.]
“This pre-existent, eternal and divine word has now been manifested in the flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ. And that life gives not only light to the understanding,” - intellectual knowledge - “that we may know the truth, but also power to the will, that we may be obedient sons [children] of God. For in Him [Christ] the glory of God was revealed in the fullness of ‘grace and truth.’”
(Massey Shepherd, The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary, 97)
Words. Simple, small, profound: light, life, truth, grace. All in Him.
Water, air, breath, earth, sun : light and life.
Brother, mother, family, friend, guest : simple small words.
The great ideas are learned early. And last.
In our lives, in our lives in Christ.
The simple small words of the Gospel, repeated, almost redundant, like the cards laid on the table one by one, or bricks laid one at a time, row by row – or stones, building slowly, row by row, into a great temple.
Mind, spirit, heart.
The word, eternal, became flesh, and his tabernacle, his tent of meeting, he raised in the midst of the camp, as the sacred central place in the midst of the people of Israel on Sinai. With us he dwells and so we see his Glory. Glory - light, shining, and more than light: life in essential union with its source.
Now this little child is revealed in radiance, in sharp contrast to Caesar Augustus, as far from Roman pomp as what the planet is really all about: a power and a weakness that mean eternal, abundant life, and a light that both illuminates and empowers.
It is all a bit much for the parents of a small creature, weighing a handful of pounds, and not yet the handful he will become by the age of twelve… (Remember him in the Temple quizzing the elders?) … or the powerful teacher he will be as a full-grown man.
Here in the swaddling clothes is the mystery of the universe. A feeling common to many parents. Donald Nicholl said that a man gets serious when he becomes a father. (Dorothy, his wife, said for a woman it's as soon as she gets married.) And certainly things got serious for the first family almost immediately: shepherds, angels, soldiers, journey at night.
Right now, this morning after Christmas morning, we remember the child, and the infinite possibility he seems to awaken in us, an infinite possibility for hope and joy. And love.
And so as the light has come among us in this little child, this awesome beginning, we can say some more simple words, words Dag Hammarsjkold jotted down in his diary:
For all that has been— Thanks!
To all that will be— Yes!
(Hammarskjöld, Markings: 6, 83).
May it be so. Always. Amen.
The Overture of Light and Life
2021 12 26
https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/christmas-1/
Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC/Christmas/Christmas1.html
Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew, Tucson, Arizona. 8:00 am & 10:30 am.
https://stmatthew.azdiocese.org/ sermon on the youtube
(17:15-30:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcR12Z13dhE
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