Grace upon Grace (John 1)

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” 

     In the Name etc.

     John’s gospel begins with a lofty proclamation of identity between the Word and God. This Word, or Logos as the Greek has it, is, as we know, not a spoken word in the ordinary sense, but rather the Word is that through which all things come into being. And that being is life and light for humans. And, as today’s Gospel makes clear, the Word is Jesus himself, the Word made flesh, who became human, and who lived in the world as a man. This Word, this God become human in Jesus, we also name the Second Person of the Trinity. I don’t want to get into a technical theological discussion, but rather I want to talk about the great themes that John the Evangelist introduces in today’s reading. Today’s reading is usually called the Prologue to John’s Gospel, the Introduction, that is, and in it John announces the great themes of his entire book: being, life, light, grace, truth.

     Being is here more than a philosophical or a theological term. The Evangelist identifies being with life and light. Light and life ARE being, and there is no being for humans apart from life and light. That may be an obvious thing to say, but there are many places in the world where there is very little light, where life is very difficult, and where any sense of being as coming from God, of any sense of life as coming from God, is not obvious at all, is very hard to believe in. I am thinking of the wars in Syria and the Middle East and Africa and so on. The moral darkness in those situations is very dark indeed. There are other situations which are equally dark. We can all think of them, in our own society and elsewhere. That is why the Evangelist says, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” That is WHY the Word came into the world in Jesus. That is the real meaning of the Word, to be light and life in the darkness. The being that the Word shows forth in the darkness is light, is life.

     In verses 10 and 11, the Evangelist summarizes the story of Jesus’s earthly life. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” It seems as though the Evangelist is saying that the darkness did in fact overcome the being and light and life that Jesus brought into the world. But we know that the darkness of death held Jesus for only a short time. The resurrection reversed that apparent defeat. John says, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.” Glory means light, the light of life and being in Jesus that could not be extinguished. It could not be extinguished because light and life and being come from God himself.

     And we are not separated from that light and life and being. The Evangelist says, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” There are no exceptions to this; the true light enlightens everyone. Where there are life, light, being, there is God, there is Jesus. This is easy to forget in our society, which emphasizes individuality and competition and difference so much. We are constantly tempted to forget that others are valuable in God’s sight, that others have as much of being and light and life as we do. The Evangelist says, “His own people did not accept him.” We usually take this to refer to Jesus, and it does, but it can also refer to our own lack of acceptance of the other children of God, our fellow humans, whom we see every day. They are as ‘enlightened’ by God as we are. It is a good spiritual exercise, to pay attention to the thoughts that flow through our minds as we encounter other people, and to be aware of how many of those thoughts are not as accepting as they could be. It is an enlightening exercise, to say to ourselves of every person we encounter, “The true light, which enlightens this person, has come into the world.”

     “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Full of grace and truth. We say of Mary, the Mother of God, that she is “full of grace.” And today’s reading says that Jesus is “full of grace and truth.” Grace is that endlessly flowing love of God that keeps the universe and everything in it in existence, the favor of God that keeps all things flowing in a Godward direction, in their journey of return to him, to their final consummation in the new heaven and the new earth. So “full of grace” is not merely a title applied to two individuals, Mary and Jesus, but is also a description of the spiritual reality that pervades all things and people. The Evangelist says, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” We have ALL received. So when we address Mary in our devotions as “full of grace,” we are reminding ourselves that we and everyone else and everything else are also “full of grace.” This suggests another spiritual exercise that we can use in our daily lives. When we encounter others, or even see strangers on the street, we can mentally address them as “full of grace.” If we do this regularly and routinely, it will transform us and the way we see the world.

     So we realize that the opening words of today’s Gospel are not a statement of a remote, aloof eternal reality, but a description of the world that we know, a clue to right understanding of it, and a guide to how to live in the world in such a way as to bring us all into awareness of the reality of God for us and everyone else.                      

     “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

    

    

The One who is to come (Matthew 11)

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

     All religious searching, it seems to me, one way or another, amounts to asking questions. And the questions are universal, they are very old, and every honest person asks them, sooner or later. What is real? Does God exist? Why is evil so widespread and persistent? What can be done about it? Is love real? Who among all the prophets and teachers and philosophers and mystics perceives the truth? What is truth? Does religion, any religion, offer any credible answers, any insights at all into the human condition, that we can use? And so on and on. We can all think of variations to questions like these, and we can all think of more questions along the same lines. Questioning is at the heart of the effort to understand our experiences and to do something to make them easier to bear.

     And so it is with John the Baptist. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” He is looking for the Messiah, the Anointed One, who will deliver Israel from the foreign oppressor. John takes it for granted that there will be a Messiah. The only question is, who it is, and whether he has come or not.

     Jesus, it seems to me, doesn’t actually answer the question. Matthew lets us know in verse 2 that he (Matthew) thinks that Jesus is the Messiah, when he writes, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples.” But in this reading, Jesus doesn’t confirm that belief himself, or respond to that expectation directly. Instead, he tells John’s followers to report what they hear and see. Nothing more than that. What they hear and see. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news brought to them.” In other words, Jesus is not, at least at this moment, claiming the traditional religious title and role of Messiah. He’s doing something else: he is opening the eyes and ears of John’s followers, and ultimately the eyes and ears of everyone else who is ready for it, to the presence, the reality of divine power, attested to here by miracles. Notice how Jesus does this. He inverts, he turns upside down, our usual expectations of how the world works: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead have life. But the most world-inverting thing Jesus says in this reading is, “The poor have good news brought to them.” We live in a world very much like the ancient world, where the poor are slighted, denigrated, abused, deprived, and so on. This sort of thing goes on everywhere, even in our own city, where we do make good efforts to help the poor, to ‘bring good news to them,’ we may say. So even we can sense something of the impact this remark must have had on those who first heard it. The poor were of no importance in that world, so anyone bringing good news to them would be a sensation, and a subversive, dangerous one at that. And the good news they are brought is the news of the kingdom, and of their rightful place in it.

     Jesus is aware that he may be subverting traditional expectations. He says, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” He knows that traditionalists may be disturbed, offended, by his teaching and miracles. But those who see and hear him for what he is, are blessed. That is, they have an opportunity to glimpse spiritual reality in the vision of the upended, inverted world, which Jesus is putting before them.

     John’s followers leave, to take back to John what they hear and see. And Jesus turns to the crowd, and he says, “So, what are YOU looking at? Hm? You came all the way out here into the desert for WHAT? A reed shaken by the wind? Well, you may be right there! There isn’t much in the desert except wind and sand and rock and the occasional plant! You came out here looking for glorious spectacle? You are definitely in the wrong place! No? Oh, you came looking for a prophet? Is that so? Well, then. Let’s talk about this!”

     I hope that my rewrite of verses 7, 8, and 9 conveys something of the impact that Jesus’s words may have had on his hearers, and may have on us, if we put ourselves into that scene and really hear them. Notice what is happening here. Jesus is distancing himself, again, from a traditional expectation, the appearance of a prophet, or rather, he is expanding on the meaning of ‘prophet.’ “What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.” Evidently the crowd thinks that Jesus is a prophet, but he deflects that expectation and talks about John the Baptist instead, as a forerunner to himself. And here Jesus again upends, inverts a traditional expectation. “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.” John, in other words, is the greatest of human beings, but in the Kingdom, that doesn’t count for much. Earthly hierarchies of status, importance, supposed closeness to God, don’t count for anything in the Kingdom. We don’t have to be prophets to reach the Kingdom, and the poor, the least on earth, will be ahead of the prophets in any case.

     Do we ask the same question of Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Have we, in other words, let the reality of Jesus’s words and deeds get through to us, or are we waiting for someone else, something else, to come along and answer all our questions and fix everything for us? Are we looking for prophets in the wilderness, in the desert? There are lots of would-be prophets around these days to choose from. Are we looking for spectacle, for something unusual to entertain us? Or are we prepared for the world-upending, world-inverting deeds and words of Jesus, which can answer our searching questions, and show us the way to the Kingdom in which we will have a place with him and the prophets?

     “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.