John 1:1-18
Save your
people, O Lord. Gather us from scattered places, turn our mourning into joy and
give us gladness for sorrow. Satisfy us with your bounty. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
In the beginning…
This is where the story starts, the whole
Christian journey.
It doesn’t begin with a conversion experience or with
our baptism, or even with the resurrection of Christ.
According
to the Gospel of John, the Christian journey goes all the way back to the beginning.
Put yourself in the shoes of the earliest Christians.
You’ve just experienced a life-changing event – this
teacher, Jesus, turned your world upside down in a good way.
And then
he was executed by the occupying government.
And then
he was raised from the dead.
He changed everything that you thought you knew about
God, and people, and the rules of nature. He taught you incredibly profound
things about the way the world works – or at least, the way it ought to work.
So you want to tell people about this man, God, Jesus.
How do you begin?
You might start by saying, He is risen!
This is
a good start, because Christ rising from the dead really was the definitive
changing event that kick-started Christianity.
He is risen, the traditional Easter greeting, is a
great summary of the Gospel.
But someone who isn’t familiar with the story of Jesus
wouldn’t have any idea what you were talking about.
Who is risen?
We must go back.
There was this man, Jesus.
What was he like? Why does he matter?
Most
biblical scholars believe that there was a very early document that contained a
collection of the sayings of Jesus. They call it the Q source, because this
theory came from a German scholar, and the word for “source” in German starts
with a Q.
No one has ever actually discovered a copy of the Q
source, but its existence makes a lot of sense. There are parts of some of the
Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, that are word-for-word identical with each
other. If three different scribes recorded the same sermon of Jesus right after
he preached it, they’d use different vocabulary to do it – dinner or the meal,
the house or the home, the disciples or the followers.
But
these passages are identical. The logical conclusion is that there was one
written source that all the Gospel writers copied.
And so, it seems that the first record Jesus’ followers
made of his ministry was collection of sayings.
This was
their first attempt at answering the questions, who was Jesus? Why did he
matter? Jesus was the guy who taught us these things.
But this didn’t answer all the questions. We must go
further back.
People needed to know more about the man behind these
sayings. They wanted a description of his character.
Enter Mark, the writer of the first Gospel,
chronologically speaking.
Mark
wrote the earliest existing account of Jesus’ ministry sometime in the late 60s
or early 70s AD – about 30 or 40 years after Jesus’ resurrection.
As the
first witnesses to Jesus’ ministry were dying off, Mark started the trend of
recording the event for posterity.
If you look to the opening chapter of the Gospel of
Mark, you’ll see that he begins with a comparison.
Most of
you have heard of this other guy, John. Remember John? Oddball preacher who
baptized people in the wilderness? The one we all thought was a messenger foretold
by the prophet Isaiah?
Jesus was kinda like John, only better.
Take
John, the best preacher most of us have ever heard, the one who led so many
people into a new relationship with God, who was so controversial that he was
arrested and executed – take that guy, and then multiply his message by a
thousand. That’s what Jesus was like.
Who was Jesus? Why did he matter?
Mark’s answer is a comparison.
But, as the Christian message spread, and more people
heard about Jesus – how he conquered death, how he spoke with wisdom, how he
was better than any other teacher – more questions arose about who this guy
really was.
He is risen! This is what he taught. This
is who he was like.
These simple explanations couldn’t work
for a broader audience.
There needed to be more of a story.
Matthew and Luke took a shot at describing Jesus for
the world. These Gospels were written about 10 years later than Mark. Matthew
was written primarily for a Jewish audience, and Luke was written primarily for
Gentiles – for people who may have been unfamiliar with Judaism and Hebrew
culture.
Matthew
started his Gospel with a genealogy going all the way back to Abraham, the patriarch
around whom the Jews had built their identity. Starting with Abraham, Matthew names
an all-star list of Jewish ancestors, and this lineage culminates with the
birth of Jesus.
Who is Jesus? He’s the one we’ve been waiting for
since the time of Abraham. Jesus is the promised Messiah, the person who will
redeem the Hebrew people.
That tactic wouldn’t have worked with Luke’s audience.
Writing
for Gentiles, Luke needed something more globally relevant. So he sat down to
write an “orderly account” as he called it, and filled the beginning of his
Gospel with stories about Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Mary. Luke makes the
characters relatable and believable for his readers, so that they can relate to
Jesus and understand his message, once he finally enters the scene in chapter
two.
Who is Jesus? He’s a real person, someone like you, a
holy man sent by God for the sake of all
people on the earth – not just the Jews.
Jesus is risen, he teaches, he’s like John, he comes
from Abraham, he came for the sake of the world.
But questions remain.
And so we come to the Gospel of John, written another
20 years or so later than Matthew and Luke, about 70 years after the death and
resurrection of Jesus.
In the beginning.
Does that sound familiar yet?
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. And God spoke.
In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
John
takes us all the way back to the beginning – not the beginning of the ministry
of Jesus, or even the beginning of the Jewish people, but to the very beginning
of the world.
In the beginning was the Word. [hands wide]
And the Word became flesh and lived among us. [hands close]
In the course of a few verses, John takes us from the
big picture – as big as it gets, the overarching story of the creation of the
universe – to our own time and place, to God actually choosing to dwell in our
midst.
Here, in
the first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John, we have the summary of the
Christian message – Jesus came, a guy similar to John the Baptist and yet
totally out of his league. Jesus, the divine Word, timeless, present at
creation, was also flesh and blood just like us.
Jesus is everything that Christians have been saying
for years, and more.
John’s Gospel starts off with a confession
of faith.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without
him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life.
I
believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
The Word became flesh.
I
believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only son, our Lord. He was born – he became incarnate – he was given a human body
along with all its frailties.
This confession of faith, as it turns out, is also a
Christmas story.
Jesus is
God in human form, the eternal creator of the universe born as a member of
God’s chosen people.
That’s why we’re hearing this passage today, on the
second Sunday of Christmas. It’s not as popular as the birth narrative from
Luke, but the opening verses of John still tell the story of God miraculously
coming to earth as a human.
This passage invites us to look at the story of Jesus
through a wide-angle lens.
Sometimes
it’s worth picking a Bible passage apart, and unearthing the meaning of each
particular word, and researching the original historical context, and analyzing
the verses as if they were an equation that needed to be solved.
Sometimes that’s the right way to interpret the Bible.
But not this passage from John.
John 1
is like an impressionist painting – you have to look at the whole thing, and
let an understanding of the picture come over you as you absorb it.
If you try to break it into too many pieces, you’ll
just end up with meaningless splotches of color that don’t mean much on their
own.
John is trying to paint a picture with his
words.
For me, I imagine something like the stained glass
window that is right through that door, where a star comes down and touches the
earth with its light, and transforms the world so that it finally makes sense for
the first time ever.
For you, the picture may look a little
different.
So I’d invite you to close your eyes and hear some of
these words again, and let your imagination loose.
In the beginning was the
Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with
God.
All things came into being
through him,
and without him not one
thing came into being.
What has come into being in
him was life,
and the life was the light
of all people.
The light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
He came to
what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.
But to all
who received him,
who
believed in his name,
he gave
power to become children of God,
who were
born,
not of
blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man,
but of God.
And the
Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have
seen his glory,
the glory
as of a father’s only son,
full of
grace and truth. (1:1-5, 11-14)
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment