Our Lord and Our Bible

Text:  John 1:1-18

Theme:  "Our Lord and Our Bible"

2nd Sunday After Christmas Day

January 5, 2014

FIRST  PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Denton, Texas

Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

 

+In the Name of Jesus+

 

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome^[a] it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. ⁸ He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.

⁹ The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet ¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

¹⁵ (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶ Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and^[b] is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

It's the last day of Christmas. Tomorrow, January 6, is the Epiphany of our Lord with its own stories to tell of the manifestation, the revealing, the disclosure of Jesus to the world. But  let's not get ahead of ourselves.  There's more than a little bit of Christmas left in our Gospel Reading, the Johannine prologue.  Out of the entire eighteen verses in the prologue, specific Christmas reference is verse 14: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." That's the NIV translation, and it's pretty heavy-duty stuff, so we better get it right.  The Living Bible, which was all the rage when I was a 15 year old whipper-snapper, puts it this way:  "And Christ became a human being and lived here on earth among us... ."  Sounds good to me, but I hadn't learned the Greek when I was a kid, and, besides, Living Bible is a paraphrase and not a direct translation. Next time you're at Mardel, the Christian bookstore here in town, and once you get past the "Duck Dynasty" kiosk right there in front, grab a Bible off the shelf -- any Bible will do -- and find a clerk. Ask the clerk if it's a translation or a paraphrase.  They'll look at you funny!   

Back to the text.  More recently, Eugene Peterson's "The Message" (another paraphrase) renders it as follows:  "The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood."  Sounds as though Jesus lives right down the street.   Peterson gives us a "Mr. Rogers" sort of paraphrase.  Jesus is here!  "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood," and all of that.  It's the Jesus of the cardigan sweater!

If you go with your grandmother's King James version (a translation), you're getting warmer:  "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us."  You're really heating up -- and you can really impress your friends -- when you go with the Latin:  Et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis.  Why not tattoo it on your arm or across your back!   You're absolutely red-hot when you go with the Greek:  Kai O Logos sarcs egeneto kai eskenosen en emin. Here's my direct translation from the Greek:  "And the Word flesh became and pitched His tent among us."  I went with the "tent" rendering of eskenosen because it implies travel.  You never really could pin Jesus down as He made His way to the cross.    My other option would be to go with the "tabernacle" translation -- as in:  "The Word became flesh and 'tabernacled' among us."  Tent or tabernacle? Either way, any Jewish contemporary of Jesus would think back when the ark of the covenant -- the repository of the glory of the Lord on earth -- moved around in a tent or a tabernacle.  Now, says John, that Lord of glory moves around in a human body.  Was he 5'10"or 6'2"? Was His complexion fair or ruddy?  Was He right-handed or left?  Just how long was his beard?  And was there any male pattern baldness?  The texts of Scripture do not lend themselves to our aesthetic and artistic sensibilities when it comes to Jesus.  In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Isaiah says:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

 An "Elephant Man" Jesus would seem to be more "Scriptural", or else our Lord needs a makeover.  And we Christians, sad to say, are only too ready to offer it.  We turn Jesus into spiritual silly putty, and we mold and shape him to fit our politics and our worldviews; we make Him a member of our club.  And -- like the Pharisees and even the devil himself --we always find a Scripture for it.

 

One very popular worldview at the time of Jesus was called Gnosticism.  It came from the Greek term gnosis which meant knowledge, and it borrowed from the Platonic or Socratic philosophical schools.  One popular version of Gnosticism held that every human being had a spark of the divine within them.  Call it your spirit; call it your soul, or what have you, but you had a spark of God within you.  That's what made you special.  But there was this one problem:  that spark was trapped; it was stuck inside your body.  Only when you shed your mortal coil, only when you died (so the thinking went) would you finally be set free.  That spark within you would fly away and return to the celestial fire.  It would go back to God.  No wonder Socrates gladly drank the hemlock.  The problem with humans, in the Gnostic view, was simply this:  you're human.  That's what's holding you back:  your body! 

 

But try that out on the Johannine prologue!   John didn't think that the problem was the human body.  Quite to the contrary!  The human body was -- and is! -- the repository not just of a spark of the divine.  In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, that body holds the entire celestial fire!  In Jesus Christ, God honored the human body that God created  -- and dwelled in it fully. 

 

How well was that received?  The reviews are mixed, and they still are mixed. Some thumbs up.  Other thumbs down.  On the thumbs down side, there is this:  John says that "He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him." Maybe that's not so bad.  Lots of people these days prefer not to be recognized.  They value their anonymity.  Even Jesus told His closest followers, at times, to keep things quiet about Him.  Theologians call it the "secrecy motif". In short, it's Jesus without a nametag!

 

But the worst of the thumbs down, the hardest to take, is this.  John says that Jesus "came to that which was his own"; he came to his ta idia, to his own people and places and things, to his own creation.  And "His own people" -- his hoi idioi -- "did not receive him." They denied His application.   In short, he was rejected.  He still is -- and not only by those who never darken the door of a church.  The rejection is most ecumenical, and it crosses denominational lines.  Those who are reject Him are often the first to claim allegiance to Him, and they'll even support Him -- as long as He becomes a "kinder, gentler" Moses; a new law-giver that helps them to build their brand of religion.

 

"The law was given through Moses," says our text.  But "grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." 

 

The thumbs up side, the positive side of the review, is as follows:  "To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

 

Do you get it?  It's not that you are Jewish, Gentile, native American, German, or Scottish.  It's not that you claim Luther, Calvin, Pope Francis, Joyce Meyer, or Joel Osteen.  It's not about your ancestry, pedigree, attainments, resume'.  Do you get it?  It's not that you even made a decision for Christ or gave your heart to Jesus. Do you get it?  It's not that a parent or some authority figure made you knuckle under, forced you to go to Confirmation Class,  and to "believe or else!"  You have received Jesus in the Holy Gospel and the Sacraments.  And through a miracle of God's Holy Spirit you have to come to believe in the Name of Jesus.  You have been given the right -- as a sheer gift -- to be a child of God.

 

John 1:1-18.  It's a text worth committing to memory.  It has so much to say about who our Lord was and is.  It has much to say about our Bible and how it can be faithfully interpreted.  You can't have one without the other.  Without Jesus, the Bible becomes essentially a book of commands and punishments. It seeks conformity; it produces a "we versus they" thinking.  But without the Bible, Jesus becomes the proverbial blank slate -- a wispy, willowy, historical figure that we can superimpose our views upon. 

 

Your takeaway, this morning, is this:  Jesus is the Bible -- God's Word! -- in flesh.  Jesus is full, as John says, of "grace and truth."  Some -- like modern Pharisees and even like the devil himself -- will quote Scripture, pull it all out of context, set Jesus aside, and follow it all to hellish places.  But others will follow the grace and truth in Jesus Christ.

 

Who or what will you follow in 2014?  Happy New Year!

 

Amen.