read before burning

"In the beginning was the Word..."

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 (from American nothingism). 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 shepherds and angels 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.’

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 mature to 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, reported it becomes serious for a woman as soon as she is 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. 

May it be so. Always. Amen.