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God Was In Christ Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 28, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill John 1:1-18
“The Word became flesh,” is John’s way of telling us that Christ is born. No mention of shepherds in a field; no story of Mary and Joseph; neither a manger where he was laid nor a star to announce his birth but rather a Word become flesh and spoken into the world’s astonished darkness. More than the other gospels, John’s narrative does business with Christ’s origin and God’s incarnation. We are about to attempt the same on the Sunday after Christmas. The Word became flesh, said John. God was in Christ, wrote Paul. How are we to get our minds around the claim that the great God Almighty actually became a human being? If on this Sunday after the halls have been decked we mean to do business with the theological claim of Christmas and not just the trappings of a holiday—-the claim that God was in Christ, that the Word became flesh—-we must consider critically what we mean when we say the word “God.” “When endeavoring to confront those persons who are willing to believe in God,” writes Scottish theologian Donald Baillie, “but not in the Incarnation, I [am] constrained to ask: Are you sure you know what you mean by ‘God’? And now,” he says, “I must pursue the question further. It is astonishing how lightly many people assume that they know what the word ‘God’ means. But it is still more astonishing that even when we profess Christian belief and set out to try to understand the mystery of God becoming [human], we are apt to start with some conception of God, picked up we know not where, an idol of the cave or of the market-place; and then to attempt the impossible task of understanding how such a God could be incarnate in Jesus.” When we speculate about how God could have become human, the God in our head bears no relation to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Rather our concept of God issues in words, lots of words like eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible. Such are the words, the perfectly proper words, found in our Book of Confessions that we associate with the word “God.” But how, we ask, could such a being end up in a virgin’s womb or crucified on a cross? Impossible! Therefore in our bifurcated minds we continue to imagine a disembodied being whom we call “God” as the being to whom we sometimes pray in pinch; the deity with whom we get exasperated because we do not see any evidence of this God’s reality in our time of need. Then in order to make some sense of the claim that God’s Word become flesh, we turn literally to Jesus’ words. In those old red letters we seek definition for our discipleship; we try to follow the teachings of Jesus [read: his words], believing his words to be the sum and substance of God’s Word become flesh, what God would say if God were to talk to us and tell us in person the things God wants us to do. But if his teachings are all that really matter here, if there is no real relationship in need of redeeming, then we need only confess him to be a dead tutor, albeit the best that ever was. We can simply imitate what he has done rather than be surprised by what he might yet do. Moreover all this talk about being of one substance with God in order to say that in him God has come to us who continue to flee from God is unnecessary. Make his teachings into an ethic and his ethic into prescribed behavior that befits being good and we are back to redeeming the relationship ourselves by being good in the eyes of a God we know no better nor are closer to with Jesus than without him. This is neither the intent of John’s claim nor is it the content of the church’s confession. The law [the behavior, the ethics] was given through Moses, says John. Grace and truth [the revelation of God’s person and our humanity] came through Jesus Christ. These words in John’s first chapter were words, among others, that led the early church to confess him to be “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.” Note: it is “not what Jesus said” that is confessed to be of one substance with God “but that he is.” Or put the other way around according to Robert Jenson, “the Word is not what Jesus says but Jesus is what God says!” So, says John, if you want to know God, begin with the Word God has spoken from the beginning, begin with the Word in whose flesh God has communicated himself, begin with Jesus. God says Jesus and as faith seeks understanding in him, we become in him the persons we will be: children of God [now the word explodes with meaning!] born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man but of God. “If the Incarnation has supremely revealed God,” says Baillie, “shown [God] to us in a new and illuminating light, put a fresh meaning into the very word that is His name, that is the meaning that we must use in facing the problem of the Incarnation, because that is what God really is.” But our doubt persists. How do we know the one John saw in a stranger walking toward him at the Jordan was God’s Word made flesh? Here is the real leap. Here we can only ask after the trustworthiness of the witnesses. Like all the gospel writers, John remembered backwards from the empty tomb to the cross, through Jesus’ ministry, to his baptism. So if we try to verify the witness--of John, of Andrew, Peter, Philip, Nathanael and the rest of the disciples, of the woman at the well, the official at Capernaum, the man at the pool of Bethesda, the woman caught in adultery, the man blind from birth, Mary and Martha and Lazarus--we can only receive their ancient reports: that in Jesus they somehow had to do--singularly, uniquely--with God’s address. In Jesus they knew the distance between themselves and God to be ended. In him they encountered the content of the word ‘God’: God identified—some even say God “working out his self-identification”--in Him who had pitched a tent with them in the beginning and had-after he was raised-appeared on the beach for breakfast. “‘The Word of God,’” again says Jenson “is no esoteric or supernatural sort of word. Nor is it a book or doctrine. It is any normal address of one…to another which succeeds finally; which sets a meaning encompassing all the future. ‘The Word of God’ is any word from one…to another which promises not merely this or that, but that life will indeed have a conclusion.” There were, of course, those who never heard God’s Word in Jesus Christ this side of the grave and John tells us of these too: of Nicodemus who came to Jesus by night and could not let go of the God in his head long enough to be grasped by the Word addressed to him by God in Jesus; of the religious leaders from the gospel writer’s day transcribed back into Jesus’ life and made to oppose him with a concept of God commensurate with their reading of the law and the prophets. We encounter the political leaders of Jesus’ day—-Pilate in particular—-who seems almost to hear a Word addressed to him in the silence before his sentence, a Word worthy of the name Truth. But in the end only his question concerning truth hangs in the air, a question whose answer is condemned to hang on a cross by all who understood what was at stake in receiving God’s Word. “Whatever he may or may not have himself claimed to be,” says Jenson, “he was either indeed the Messiah and a unique Son, or a blasphemer.” Either he was like every other word that had come down the pike, or in him God spoke and God continues to speak decisively. As for you and me and our response to God’s Word in the aftermath of Christmas, you could say we have only these witnesses or you could say we have the incredible advantage of these witnesses, of John in particular this morning, whose gospel is a voice in the wilderness still, preparing hearts and minds to receive him and believe in his name. In a sense, we are no different in relation to Jesus than the characters in John’s gospel. “No one has ever seen God,” John reminds us at the end of his prologue. “It is God the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” “I remember them saying,” wrote priest turned novelist James Carroll, “as I had said myself, that all we know of God is revealed in Jesus Christ. I arrived in the Holy Land wanting to believe that but not knowing what it meant….I found myself living in a monks’ house that was halfway between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Halfway, I understood at once, between birth and death. Halfway, I suspected, between belief and disbelief. “What little I saw of Jesus was from the hill. I traced the road with my eyes…from the village where he was born to the city where he died….I longed to see my days in his. I looked at Bethlehem, turned and looked again. Human beings had waited and watched here for centuries, for millennia; I would be one of them…. “[So] I turned toward John’s Jesus as leaves in the morning turn toward the sun. The man described there was one of us. He would be with us drinking until dawn. He would cook us omelets on the beach and mock our piety. He would rebuke our ease with lies, never allowing us to forget the hunger stalking bodies and souls. He would show us not only how to pray but how to doubt. Only after making atheists of all of us would he teach us new names for the being who seemed too far way and yet a part of ourselves.” Thanks be for God’s Word become flesh that dwells, even now, even here, among us. Amen. |